Denise Phillips begins her monograph with a puzzle. “Historians,” she points out, “have a long tradition of treating ‘Wissenschaft’ as the primary conceptual peculiarity that marked off German-speaking intellectual life from other language traditions throughout the nineteenth century” (6). For most nineteenth-century Europeans, however, it was not the concept of Wissenschaft, but rather Naturwissenschaft, that proved problematic. For anglophone and francophone writers, German conceptions of natural science remained largely alien throughout most of the nineteenth century. Phillips argues that problems of translation provide clues to the emergence of a new kind of person, the natural scientist, in German-speaking central Europe.

Though the book draws on the methods of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), Phillips employs the tools of cultural history to explain the arrival of this new person, the Naturforscher, upon the stage of German history. She does not, however, look in the usual places—universities and scientific academies—for answers. The German university has been the dominant site for investigations of nineteenth-century science, but Phillips chooses instead to focus her study on Dresden—a city without a university—and its natural scientific societies. Her account departs in important ways from familiar narratives about the development of nineteenth-century German science, especially those of R. Steven Turner (In the Mind's Eye, 1994) and William Clark (The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, 1999; Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, 2006). She wants to know why “German intellectuals”—a less precise category than Clark's professors or Turner's Bildungsbürger—“aligned themselves with certain broad, general habits of linguistic usage” (22).

Her story begins in earnest at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when Phillips discerns a “change in tone” (84) about dabblers and amateurs. It has become commonplace to regard 1800 as a break, but she does not accept that. For her, this was not the moment when an increasingly specialized science broke away from a broader public culture. Rather, the central issue during the early decades of the nineteenth century involved membership and identity. Who belonged to the learned public, and who did not? Who was competent to judge? If there was a break or shift in this story, it occurred around 1830, when a consensus emerged about the value of pursuing the natural sciences as a unified collective enterprise. Phillips is not especially interested in interrogating the consistency or content of that vision, admitting that there were many variations. What she wants to know is how and why it became a powerful cultural force.

Weaving its way deftly through the lives of everyday Saxons, the book traces the ways in which identity arched and shifted, and how elite Naturforscher gradually rallied around the notion of a general science of nature. That notion itself, Phillips argues, gained appeal from larger social and political forces: “a new general science of nature appeared when Naturforscher appropriated a central value of a new, emerging bourgeois public culture and cast their science in its image” (150).

There are some unexpected moments in the story—such as when Phillips discovers the origins of the great divide between Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften in the musings of a Dresden schoolmaster named Eduard Calinich. She uses this episode effectively as a way in which to introduce the importance of the educational debates of the Vormärz period for the rise of Naturwissenschaft. Her argument also casts a new light on discussions about the relationship between science and economic development. Recognizing that there is little evidence for any such direct relationship, she insists nonetheless that science, as a unifying concept, might have had an impact on economic growth. The argument seems to be that Wissenschaft, even if it could not produce direct technological and economic effects, was still a transformative sociocultural force that created new forms of collective action.

Phillips does a nice job of interweaving philosophical debate with the concrete details of everyday life: Dresden schoolteachers and weddings in the Plauen Gorge, botanical enthusiasts and local medical professors. She breathes life into the often too abstract history of Wissenschaft, forcing us to see it through the complex mediation of local settings. As noted earlier, she takes issue throughout the book with some of the existing interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German science, interpretations that take the German university as central. In some cases, especially with regard to William Clark's work, her account can be too dismissive: the differences between Phillips and Clark are largely reflected in the realms they chose to examine: the German university, on the one hand, and the broader milieu of Dresden intellectuals, on the other. How these worlds fit together, or did not, remains an open question. Denise Phillips deserves thanks for having broadened the conversation.