"Ueber die Eide": Zucht und Kritik im Preußen der Aufklärung (review)

Combining original historical research and compelling theoretical work, Ueber die Eide presents a fascinating genealogy of concepts of oaths and perjury in eighteenth-century Prussia. As the author shows, the Streit um den Eid was an important site where the relationship between individual and state was reimagined and where discourses across law, theology, ethics, and aesthetics intersected. Marcus Twellmann tracks the use of oaths in civic life as a form of social and political discipline, showing how practices of oath-swearing came to be secularized, such that the entity to which one would swear loyalty and obedience shifted from divine instances of power to the state. This study raises important questions about language's reliability in communicating the intentions of speakers and its role in ceremony and performance, as well as about certain anti-Jewish lines of thought at the heart of anti-Enlightenment theology and political thought.

Twellmann juxtaposes philosophically rewarding readings of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai, Hamann, and other key figures to recent theoretical and historiographical paradigms, taking particular issue with Koselleck's narrative (via Carl Schmitt) of the Enlightenment as a process that privatizes individual belief and conviction and contrasts private inwardness to the external realm of state power. Twellmann's institutional critique shows how the state sought to instrumentalize individual convictions as much as rational theology sought to neutralize state religion. Twellmann works through complexification and problematization, seeking out facile points in dominant theoretical constructs.

Chapters on Kant and Moses Mendelssohn serve as two key hinges in the book's argument. On the one hand, Kant critiqued oaths of religious confession and civic loyalty while living and working within state institutions where such oaths were necessary. Kant's influential theory of rational moral conscience runs counter to practices of oath-giving, since for Kant, oaths cannot really manifest or encourage the subject's adherence to the call of conscience. This moral theory is tested by Kant's civil service as a university professor, and here Twellmann provides a nuanced and original account of Kant's publishing and instructional practices. Mendelssohn took a more differentiated view of the oath in envisioning a rationalized Prussian society where Jews have more political freedoms. As Twellmann shows, justifying rationalized uses of sworn statements was an important strategy in Mendelssohn's pursuit of institutional reform in Jerusalem. Countering stereotypes that oaths by Jews were not believable, Mendelssohn views the oath as an integral part of Judaism as rational religion.

Twellmann is at his best when doing discourse analysis that brings together theology, legal thought, and philosophy. His readings of Nicolai's Sebaldus Nothanker and a "bürgerliches Trauerspiel" by Engel are especially interesting in this light, and operate less as pure literary readings. It might have been nice to see more rhetorical analysis of scenes of oaths from the literary tradition, but this was clearly not Twellmann's focus.

One of the most suggestive parts of the book is its consideration of anti-Enlightenment strains of thought in Hamann and Carl Schmitt, who adapts Hamann's critique of Mendelssohn in the 1930s. As Twellmann shows, Schmitt argues that Jewish thinkers, such as Spinoza and Mendelssohn, helped to bring about the separation of private conscience and public power at the heart of the modern state. Twellmann's incisive critique of Schmitt is two-pronged. First, he claims that Schmitt ignores the institutional realities on the ground in eighteenth-century Prussia—in fact, the Prussian state did not adhere to this separation of inner and outer and was quite proactive in regulating individual conscience. Second, Twellmann shows that Schmitt follows Hamann in pursuing a longstanding antisemitic line of argument that identifies Judaism and the Enlightenment and presents Jews as agents of the secularization and de-Christianization of the state. Twellmann's claim that both Schmitt and Hamann affirm longstanding stereotypes that Jews cannot give believable oaths is convincing and suggestive, and implicitly seems...