In this study of public debates over sex in Imperial Germany, Edward Ross Dickinson offers a new model of modernity, one that focuses not on the tension between the liberatory and disciplining potential of modernization, but rather on the “dynamics of the complexity modernity generates” (6). According to Dickinson, these debates over sexuality were inherently political, not just in the broad Foucauldian sense of struggles for power, but also in the specific sense of clearly identifiable interests and social agendas. In this historical moment, sex became a focus for political debate because it was “about” other things, specifically the big questions of the day, such as population policy, gender relations, and national defense, as well as basic questions about the human social experience: the basis of ethical or moral behavior, for example, the liberty of the individual, and the nature of human nature. Dickinson takes issue with scholars who characterize the discourse of sexuality in this period as one of consensus; instead, he argues that it was open-ended and without a clear resolution even by 1914. Moreover, these debates were fluid and “dynamic” (7) because of the conflicts among and within various groups as they struggled to define their own positions against one another and to influence public policy. Modernization did not, he concludes, lead to homogenization but rather to a diversification of views.

Dickinson acknowledges his debt to the large body of scholarship on the history of sexuality, but does not directly engage the literature—something he has done in several previously published analytical essays. The scholarship on the history of sexuality, he writes, tends to be “specialized” (7), focusing on the political agendas of particular movements and on the relative successes or failures of those movements. This is why he goes back to the original source material, largely the abundant published material produced by reformers and sexual scientists. Those familiar with the history of sexuality and the women's movement will find a fresh perspective on familiar material. The initiate will find Dickinson's work an excellent starting point for examining discussions about sexuality, if not for the literature on the history of sexuality.

The study proceeds in three parts devoted to the Christian morality movement, the sex reform movement, and sexual science. Dickinson begins with the morality reformers, who claimed that Christian morality had emancipated the individual from slavery to base desires. The crusade against prostitution was the most important aspect of that campaign: it reflected the conservative Christian moralist rejection of the sexual double standard, a position shared by members of the women's movement. There were tensions within the Christian morality movement, however. For example, while Christian women focused their attention on protecting women from male sexual aggression and morality, Christian men tended to worry more about race and class.

Though the Christian reformers opened the debate by placing sexuality on the public reform agenda, they quickly faced challenges from the secular sex reform movement, from socialists, and from the homosexual rights movement. Dickinson traces socialist contributions to the emergence of radical sexualities, which became more factious with the emergence of Marxist revisionism, and to the monist and Romantic-individualist roots of the German sex reform movement, which overlapped significantly with the socialist movement. Other reform movements, particularly the movement for homosexual emancipation and the League for the Protection of Motherhood, followed similar patterns. Each began with a fairly focused critique of the constraints upon the individual in society, such as the anti-sodomy law (§175) and the status of illegitimacy, and, by 1908, each had developed into an extremely diverse movement.

Dickinson's penultimate chapter examines the “diversity, unity, and polarization” (245) of sexual science. Liberal sexologists involved in the sex reform movement tended to see eugenics as a way of improving society, though race was not important to them. By contrast, conservative sexologists eschewed eugenics but were deeply racist and misogynistic. Dickinson's explanation for their position lies in the rapidly changing social landscape in Germany: the women's movement and the increasing role of women in public life, the growth of Social Democracy, and the rise of mass culture. In other words, sexologists sought to defend their heterosexual, white, bourgeois, male privilege against apparent challenges to their social power.

Dickinson succeeds in demonstrating that there was a striking diversity of opinion in this period about the role of sex in society, about sexual morality, about the liberating potential of sexuality, and about the nature of human sexuality. Seen from this perspective, Imperial Germany appears to have been a much more diverse and open place than the authoritarian society often portrayed in the historiography. But is it desirable—or, indeed, even possible—to divest the history of sexuality from the history of power relations, which are at the heart of critiques of modernity? Dickinson writes in his conclusion that modernity “creates a brawl” by granting people “the wherewithal to articulate and assert their identities, their values, and their agendas” (315). But is the brawl more important than the outcome of the struggle? And is the brawl, if we choose to follow that bellicose metaphor, open to all comers, or only to those with the wherewithal to enter the fray—i.e., those who have education, cultural capital, and access to technologies of communication?

To be sure, Dickinson appropriately acknowledges in his study the real, existing oppression faced by some historical actors—the suppression of homosexuality and the misogyny of much of sexual science, for example. But surely the successes of the Christian morality movement outweighed those of the League for the Protection of Motherhood. And the homosexual rights movement did not succeed in its most basic goal: the repeal of §175. While the diversity of views is certainly important, Dickinson's model of diversity implies a homology that denies the very unequal power relations that limited the possibilities Dickinson seeks out. One striking example is the homosexual rights movement, which—because of the socio-legal framework in which it emerged—generated a masculinist movement that offered phallocentric possibilities for non-normative sexual identities. Surely these considerations are not merely “specialized” questions but rather existential questions about the modern politics of sexuality. The claim that “what was most important were not the politics of sexuality but the politics of the politics of sexuality” (10) is thus not persuasive. Perhaps the promised sequel will prove more convincing in that regard.