A new political system in which recruitment into public office was to be based on merit and impersonality—something the Chinese had discovered nearly two millennia earlier—was then brought to the rest of Europe by a man on horseback. Napoleon’s defeat of a patrimonial Prussian army at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806 convinced a new generation of reformers like Baron vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg that the Prussian state would have to be rebuilt on modern principles.35
