Reforming the moral subject : ethics and sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930 / Tracie Matysik.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction. Critical Ethics, or the Subject of Reform -- Pt. I. Ethics Reform -- 1. An Ethics of Gesellschaft -- 2. The "New Ethic": A Particularist Challenge -- Pt. II. The Sexualization of the Moral Subject -- 3. Conflicted Sexualities and Conflicted Secularisms -- 4. Global Influences, Local Responses -- 5. Moral Laws and Impossible Laws: The "Female Homosexual" and the Criminal Code -- Pt. III. Resonances and Resistances -- 6. Social Matters: Social Democracy and the Ethics of Materialism -- 7. Losses and Unlikely Legacies: Psychoanalysis and Femininity -- Afterword: Moral Citizenship, or Ethics beyond the Law.

"Reforming the Moral Subject explores a movement known as "ethics reform" that flourished in Central Europe between 1890 and 1930. Tracie Matysik examines the works of German-speaking intellectuals and activists - moral philosophers, sociologists, legal theorists, pedagogy specialists, psychoanalysts, sexual liberationists, and others - who discovered in the language of ethics a means to revitalize the public sphere." "Matysik's compelling intellectual and cultural history of ethics and moral subjectivity reframes the nature of German liberalism and intellectual activism from the end of the nineteenth century until the interwar period."--BOOK JACKET.