The Origins and Politics of
Modern German Intellectual Culture

I.    Answers to the question “What is Enlightenment?”
II.   The curious career of the Enlightenment in Germany
III.  Was Germany different?
IV.   Social origins of the educated elite
V.   The mandarins' drift from utopia to ideology

Immanuel Kant, “Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?'” (1784)
1.  autonomy
2.  division from nature
3.  the public use of reason
4.  history as progress

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947)
composed 1941-1944
emigration and exile (Frankfurt/New York/Santa Monica)
Hegel:  reason and terror (French revolution)
Nietzsche:  knowledge as a form of power
Weber:  the disenchanting of the world
counter-enlightenment
romanticism

the paradigm of German illiberalism
Sonderweg (special or peculiar path)
Bildungsbürgertum = educated upper-middle class
enlightened absolutism
Prussia
Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786)
University of Halle (in Prussia) / cameralism
University of Göttingen (in Hannover) / neo-humanism
Bildung = cultivation or self-cultivation
  • a view of human nature:  unique, organic totality
  • a view of learning:  transformative encounter with sources
  • a theory of culture:  fit between subjective and objective culture
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Prussian reform movement
Abitur / Gymnasium / University of Berlin