Abstract
Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein has a secure, if minor, place in the historical consciousness of the German nation. Assessments of his life and work are remarkably similar in both German republics, and tend towards clichés. Stein is regarded as the liberator of the peasantry and the architect of municipal reform, but his reform programme as a whole is never counted more than as a partial success, and where implemented was only done so in a watered down form. What was achieved seems as change brought about by the French Revolution; a signal so imperfectly understood that it had to be left to future generations to complete the task.
Lecture given in 1980 at Cambridge University, Faculty of History, under the chairmanship of Professor Derek Beales.
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Walther Hubatsch, Stein-Studien. Die preußischen Reformen des Reichsfreiherrn Karl vom Stein zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Cologne, 1975).
Peter Graf von Kielmansegg, Stein und die Zentralverwaltung 1813/14 (Stuttgart, 1964).
Ernst von Meier, Die Reform der Verwaltungsorganisation unter Stein und Hardenberg, 2nd edn (1912).
Gerhard Ritter, Stein. Eine politische Biographie, 3rd edn (1958).
Robert Seeley, The Life and Times of Stein, or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1878).
Freiherr vom Stein, Briefe und amtliche Schriften, ed. Walter Hubatsch, 10 vols (Stuttgart, 1957–1974).
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© 1985 Walther Hubatsch
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Hubatsch, W. (1985). Stein and Constitutional Reform in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Preconditions, Plans and Results. In: Studies in Medieval and Modern German History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17822-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17822-3_5
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