In his latest work, Jonathan Sperber returns to his beloved nineteenth-century Rhineland, in this case the Bavarian Palatinate. Drawing on a tradition among early modern historians whereby legal sources provide the raw material for social and cultural history, Sperber scrutinizes Palatine civil court records as a means of investigating the intersections between those eminently nineteenth-century institutions, civil society and the free market in property, with both the intimate realm of the family and the public world of business. This important book casts light on myriad aspects of urban and rural everyday life in the long nineteenth century, and offers new perspectives on the nature of civil society and the constructedness of social values and social relations more generally.

Sperber finds current discussions of civil society and the Habermasian public sphere wanting in at least three ways: through their neglect of the lower classes, women, and rural areas; their focus on formal associations rather than informal relations; and their omission of the economic and social practices surrounding property. Work on plebeian publics and gender over the past ten or fifteen years has already begun to close the former gaps, but Sperber has certainly identified a major problem in the present tendency to conflate civil society with the public sphere, and his book steps immediately and forcefully into that breach. He may go too far in emphasizing the centrality of property relations in civil society to the exclusion of other aspects of publicness—he could, for example, have done more to illuminate the ways in which the social and economic practices he explores were embedded within expanding networks of media, advertising, associational life, and sociability—but this already marks a major contribution to the literature on civil society and provides a welcome corrective to its previous concentration on the urban bourgeoisie, thus broadening our understanding of bürgerliche Gesellschaft.

To say that this study sets out the role of property and the law in the lives of nineteenth-century Palatines does not begin to do justice to its reach, or at least, it does so only if one already takes into account the implications of the basic truth that Sperber is arguing, namely, that “property was in everything” and “everything was in property” (p. 236). Sperber shows just how deeply ramified property was in the social, familial, and economic lives of nineteenth-century Germans. From this perspective he finds interesting and often original things to say on topics ranging from the relationships between parents and children and husbands and wives, to the growth of railroads and banking; changing attitudes toward honor, madness, and alcoholism; relations with German Jews; and, of course, the nature of the German legal system.

Moreover, rather than just using court cases involving property as a window onto this world, or showing the manifold respects in which everyday life was constituted as a web of property relations, Sperber also turns the investigation around and delineates the many ways in which notions and practices surrounding property and the law were in their turn influenced by social norms and values and informal relationships. Gender dichotomy, for example, emerges as less sharp in theory or in practice than typically depicted (as with control over marital property), and in the later part of the century there was a distinct transitional phase during which newer bureaucratic and written forms of economic culture uneasily coexisted with older, more informal oral customs. One of the most important themes running through the book was the notion (associated above all with the project of David Sabean and Hans Medick) that “interest and emotion,” or market-driven calculation and family-centered cooperation and altruism, were by no means as antithetical as often posited. On the contrary, they were mutually reinforcing, as family relationships could be mobilized to support self-interested business initiatives, and emotional ties could be articulated through that most practical of languages, property. Such a view, as Sperber makes clear, points to many potential continuities between early modern and modern societies and economies, not just to a sharp caesura attendant upon the advent of market capitalism.

In its organization the book follows conceptual lines. Two chapters dealing respectively with family relationships and business relationships are followed by two that revisit that material under the rubrics of “Boundaries” and “Changes.” This scheme is thought-provoking and insightful but not unproblematic. Readers interested in, say, gender, will need to read around in three of these chapters, which, with the aid of the index, can certainly be done. Chapter three on “boundaries” traces the ways in which property and the law were implicated in the drawing of real boundaries (as in land demarcations), social boundaries (madness, gender, religion), and cultural boundaries (notions of honor and dishonor, or of the dirty and the downright disgusting). This chapter may be a bit nominalist in its tendency to treat all types of boundary as the same sort of thing, but it does offer an interesting take on postmodern notions of the social construction of mentalities and institutions. Chapter four then provides some added narrative structure, as Sperber divides the period into four principal sections and traces the major elements of change and continuity in beliefs and practices. Throughout, Sperber alternates analytical passages with extended case studies drawn from his trove of court records. These are both effective and readable—often amusing—in illustrating themes and conveying the richness and complexities of life, though at times the wealth of detail gets in the way of generalization or the big picture.

As an intervention in debates about the nature and functioning of civil society, Sperber's new monograph will demand consideration. With such a variety of subject matter and attention to detail, it is probably true that readers will find certain portions of the book less to their taste or interest than others, but by the same token, it seems even more certain that this well-researched and well-written work has something to offer almost all students of nineteenth-century Germany, or indeed, of the transition between early modern and modern in Europe more generally.