Abstract

Fritz Ringer is best known to historians of science for his book The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 , a work that has informed so much scholarship on the history of German science. But Ringer has also written major books on the social history of European education systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as on French academic culture in the decades around 1900. This volume of collected essays makes available in English a number of pieces he published during the 1980s and 1990s, often in journals or volumes unfamiliar to most historians of science.The essays fall into three categories. Some illustrate Ringer's long‐standing interest in the historical sociology of the German academic community. One of them locates the origins of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge in the context of the social crisis of 1920s Germany. “Bildung and Its Implications in the German Tradition, 1890–1930” traces the impact of this educational concept on the political behavior of academics. And “A Sociography of German Academics, 1863–1938” is a preliminary analysis of what can be learned from survey data collected in the 1950s by Helmut Plessner and his colleagues at Göttingen .A second group of essays is concerned with the social history of European secondary and higher education systems. “Education, Economy, and Society in Germany, 1800–1960” summarizes parts of Ringer's Education and Society in Modern Europe . For historians of science its most important finding is probably the “segmentation” of secondary education from the late nineteenth century on: that is, pupils from different class backgrounds and social statuses tended to go to schools with different curricula . Having internalized different kinds of educational, and more generally cognitive, values, the different “segments” then tended to opt for different kinds of higher education and even to study different disciplines. “Education and the Middle Classes in Modern France” is actually a comparative analysis of French and German systems of secondary and higher education, ca. 1800 to the 1960s. In neither France nor Germany, Ringer argues, was the structure of the educational system primarily driven by the needs of the economy. Moreover, throughout this period both national systems tended to reinforce existing hierarchies of social status rather than to promote social mobility or open the doors of higher education to more people.Finally, two essays illustrate Ringer's comparative and sociological approach to intellectual history . “The Intellectual field, Intellectual History, and the Sociology of Knowledge” draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, and capital and outlines the analytical framework that Ringer used in Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 . “Ideas of Education and of Systematic Knowledge” is a comparative analysis of ideologies of secondary education in France and Germany that gave rise to particular intellectual orientations and conceptual preferences. As such it provides a nice example of the concept of habitus.Historians of French and German science around 1900 will obviously find these essays of value, as will anyone interested in styles of science , whether these are conceived as national traditions or much more local ones associated with particular institutions or schools. Ringer's work demonstrates how the basic cognitive predispositions that characterize such styles often originate in the structure of schooling and higher education