European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914

Contemporary Review, April, 2005

European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914. R.D. Anderson. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]55.00. viii 338 pages. ISBN 0-19-820660-7. In this well written and informative survey, Prof. Anderson's aim is to introduce readers to a wide range of specialist writing and to give his own 'interpretative account of developments during the period in which the modern university originated and flourished'.

Although he devotes specific chapters to Germany (whose universities were seen as models of organisation and research), the Austrian Empire, France, the British Isles, Italy and Spain, and Russia, he devotes more to a wide range of topics that affected European university life as a whole: the influence of the Enlightenment and of Napoleon, the nature of student life and student relations with teachers, the role of the churches, politics and the state in an increasingly liberal and secular Europe, the nature of student bodies, the increasing attention given to women, the growing accessibility of universities to the lower classes and the growth of student bodies and politics. Throughout he relates the growth and development of universities to their societies and to the increasing power of the state. Before 1914 European universities 'were indeed an achievement of liberal, bourgeois culture' but their fate 'was tied up with its future'.