'This is a book that seeks continually to undercut the binaries that structure the way in which historians have considered these issues. Secularism, in this reading, appears both inside and outside confession. Anti-clericalism was a force not just against but also within the religious sphere. Kulturkampf legislation proved as destabilising for protestant churches as for German catholics. There is intellectual history here, and social history too. But the core of Weir's book is the political meaning of secularism in the Prussian nineteenth century. For this is a study of how the constraints imposed by confessionalism and the Prussian state shaped secularism as a spiritual current and a political community. While secularism itself was never a mainstream movement, Weir argues persuasively that it punched above its weight politically and was symbiotically linked first to radical democratic associational life and politics, and then to the sub-culture that was Prussian socialism.

' Abigail Green, English Historical Reviewical Reviewical Reviewical Review.