During the Enlightenment, people from the middling sort organised themselves into 56 patriotic societies in Denmark, Norway, and the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The number of members totalled several thousand. They undertook educational and industrial reforms and participated in public debates on the need for social and political modernisation.

The founding of patriotic societies was a widespread European phenomenon and they played a key role in the Nordic Enlightenment. Yet, they have not been the subject of European or national studies before. Their emergence reflected that modern bureaucratic states were in the making, and that public administrative infrastructures and welfare institutions were expanding. These developments created a need to integrate citizens and imbue them with a spirit of community.

This monograph presents the first coherent investigation of the patriotic societies in a large, European multinational and multilingual realm. Its comparative outlook situates the intellectual and cultural developments in the Nordic countries as an integral part of the European Enlightenment. Furthermore, it offers new perspectives on tensions between patriotism, nationalism and universal values as they developed during the Enlightenment, as well as how freedom, the buzzword of the Enlightenment, implied new forms of discipline.