In the formation of a modern German social vocabulary, as in so many other passages to modernity, the eighteenth century was the crucible. Words that had evoked the legal structure and the ethos of a corporate hierarchy for centuries came to host the more familiar meanings that still attach to them, though without losing resonances from their old-regime origins. “Station” (Stand) – a word that figured large in eighteenth-century efforts to assign poor students a social identity and location – is a case in point. Well into the nineteenth century Stand remained in common use as a social and political category, at once absorbing and modifying the new language of class; that in itself is a measure of the persistence of corporate values. But often enough this was corporatism in a new key; by the late eighteenth century Stand was being used to recast the “estates of birth” in a utilitarian profile, with professional corporations ranked by function rather than by historic rights. Likewise Bürger could no longer be defined simply by reference to a specifically German urban order; it also conveyed notions of “public” rights and obligations, most of them French and English in origin, that had universal application.

In our efforts to sort out continuity and change and to understand the interplay of indigenous and imported cultural meanings, the operative word is Beruf. More than eighty years ago Max Weber demonstrated the need to explore the Protestant ethic and its more or less inadvertent contributions to modern forms of rational self-discipline by way of the ideal of calling.