"Courtesy, compliance, fine manners, on the one hand, sound education and preference of virtue to honor, on the other: German literature in the second half of the eighteenth century is full of such antitheses."
"The most vigorous expansion of the German empire occurs, by contrast, in the Middle Ages. From this time on, the German Reich diminishes slowly buy steadily. Even before the Thirty Years War and more so after it, German territories are hemmed in on all sides, and strong pressure is exerted on almost"
"However, precisely this underdevelopment of the broader, professional bourgeois classes is one of the reasons why the struggle of the middle-class vanguard, the bourgeois intelligentsia, against the courtly upper class is waged almost entirely outside the political sphere, and why the attack is dire"
"The term civilisation was, at the monment of its formation, a clear reflection of these reformist ideas. If in this term the idea of the homme civilise leads to a concept designating the manners and conditions of existing society as a whole, it is first and foremost an expression of insights derived"