Examines the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood in 1800s Vienna.

List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgements; Philosophical prologue: historical ontology and cultural reformation: Schelling in Berlin, 1841¿5; Part I. Historicism in Power: 1840 and the Historical Turn in Prussian Cultural Politics: 1. Nation, church, and the politics of historical identity: Frederick William IV's vision of cultural reformation; 2. 'Redeemed nationality': Christian Bunsen and the transformation of ethnic peoples into ethical communities under the guidance of the historical principle; Part II. Architectural and Musical Historicism: Aesthetic Education and Cultural Reformation: 3. Building historical identities in space and stone: Schinkel's search for the shape of ethical community; 4. The generation of ethical community from the spirit of music: Mendelssohn's musical constructions of historical identity; Part III. Law, Language, and History: Cultural Identity and the Self-Constituting Subject in the Historical School: 5. The tension between immanent and transcendent subjectivity in the Historical School of Law: from Savigny to Stahl; 6. The past as a foreign home: Jacob Grimm and the relation between language and historical identity; 7. Ranke and the Christian-German state: contested historical identities and the transcendent foundations of the historical subject; Antiphilosophical Epilogue: historicizing self-identity in Kierkegaard and Marx, 1841¿6; Index.