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The Emancipation of Writing is the first study of writing in its connection to bureaucracy, citizenship, and the state in Germany. Stitching together micro- and macro-level analysis, it reconstructs the vibrant, textually saturated civic culture of the German southwest in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasions

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is celebrated as perhaps the greatest management guru, and one of the greatest futurists, of the twentieth century, but he has rarely been taken seriously as an intellectual. Raised in Vienna among a cohort of émigré academics that included Schumpeter, Hayek, and von Mises, among others, Drucker was both deeply learned and incredibly prolific. This essay seeks to rehabilitate Drucker as a humanistic social thinker, reinterpreting his earliest writings in German, his two major treatises on totalitarianism and the crisis of capitalism published after he emigrated to the US, his debate with Polanyi and engagement with Kierkegaard, and his early postwar writings on management theory and the knowledge society. It identifies in Drucker's Protestant faith a deep and abiding set of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual commitments helping him to navigate a path out of Nazi Germany and assume a position of enormous influence in American business life.

G. W. F. Hegel's "Commentary on the Published Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Württemberg, 1815–1816" is the notoriously recondite philosopher's most lucid account of Germany's political transformation after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Written in a punchy, polemical style, yet brimming with philosophical distinctions, the 130–page essay features concrete analyses of political institutions, social groups, and parliamentary debates in Hegel's home state. He published it in the 1817Heidelberg Yearbooks, hoping to reach the educated public and influence the shape of Germany's constitutional order after Napoleon's defeat. The work has never been fully translated or adequately interpreted; it earns but a few, albeit astute, remarks in Terry Pinkard's recent biography. The 1999 Cambridge edition of Hegel'sPolitical Writingsomits it entirely, citing its focus on "esoteric and antiquarian matters peculiar to the political history of Württemberg." As Hegel himself realized, however, Württemberg's experience dramatized the most profound civic upheaval of the age: the shift from a corporate society composed of particular estates (Stände) to a civil society governed by universal precepts and a "rational" state.