Youth, Happiness, and Institutional Projects in the Early Eighteenth-Century German Lands

Abstract

The period of the project’s flourishing has long been recognized as one in which young people were increasingly viewed as a social group with distinct needs—such as protection from neglectful caregivers—certain weaknesses, and key strengths. With some exceptions, age has not figured centrally in ongoing work on the history of projecting that this special issue prioritizes. Yet project-makers were very interested in age and devised projects that were specifically attuned to youth as a fresh, experiential, possibility-focused stage of life. In this article I argue that many German projectors were drawn to what was widely understood to be young people’s unique orientation toward happiness, a topic of much philosophical discussion and debate by 1700. I explore several reasons why this was the case, tuning into how assumptions about happiness and age impacted institutional projects created for young people from very different social groups: Erlangen’s Ritterakademie (a school for young noblemen), Waldheim’s Zucht-Waysen und Armenhaus (a prison, orphanage, and poorhouse), and a tree-planting project for village youth. I argue that in these projects the goal was to use the relationship between labor and happiness to produce higher-quality forms of work through clever managerial techniques.