The ArgumentThe Doctor of Philosophy, a nonmedieval academic figure who spread throughout the globe in the Modern Era, and who emblemized the transformation of academic knowledge into the “pursuit of research,” emerged through a long and tortuous path in the early modern Germanies. The emergence and recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy would be correlative with the nineteenth-century professionalization of the arts and sciences. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the earlier Doctors and older “professional” faculties from the medieval university — (...) Theology, Law, and Medicine — opposed recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy. In Saxony, the forces of “medievalism” were able to block recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy, and they retained the degraded Master of Arts or Philosophy as the highest degree in arts and sciences. Forces of “modernism” prevailed, however, in Austria and Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Austria, the Doctor of Philosophy arrived as a wholly modern figure, the creation of a nice dossier and a civil service examination: the medieval “juridical” persona became a modern “bureaucratic” persona. Between this bureaucratic modernism of the Austrians and corporatist medievalism of the Saxons, the Prussians pursued a via media. Unlike the Saxons, they recognized the Doctor of Philosophy; but unlike the Austrians, they did not completely bureaucratize the candidate's persona. The Prussians demanded from the candidate a “work of research,” a doctoral dissertation, which exhibited the aesthetic qualities of the Romantic artist: originality and personality. (shrink)