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Intellectual History of Twentieth-Century Europe

Analytical Thinking
Communication
Critical Thinking

Course Description

Major trends and innovations in European intellectual life, from the fin-de-si`ecle revolt against positivism to post-structuralism and its critics. Coverage will include such thinkers as Freud, Weber, and Foucault, as well as such wider cultural movements as futurism, surrealism, and existentialism.

Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Additional research and/or paper(s) are normally required for graduate level coursework.

Athena Title

Intellect History Modern Euro

Prerequisite

Any HIST course or ENGL 1101 or ENGL 1101E or ENGL 1101S or ENGL 1102 or ENGL 1102E or ENGL 1102S or POLS 1101 or POLS 1101E or POLS 1101H or POLS 1101S

Semester Course Offered

Offered every year.

Grading System

A - F (Traditional)

Student learning Outcomes

  • By the end of this course, students will be able to arrive at conclusions through gathering and weighing of evidence, logical argument, and listening to counter argument.
  • By the end of this course, students will be able to write stylistically appropriate papers and essays. Students will be able to analyze ideas and evidence, organize their thoughts, and revise and edit their finished essays.
  • By the end of this course, students will be able to identify how the intellectual history of 20th century Europe shaped social and cultural identities and attitudes toward knowledge, art, religion, nationalism, and modernity, encouraging them to understand diverse worldviews and experiences.
  • By the end of this course, students will be able to apply appropriate methodological approaches to their analysis of primary sources and to organize their evidence to show historical continuities and discontinuities.
  • By the end of this course, students will be able to generate their own research question or topic, locate suitable primary and secondary sources, and synthesize their ideas in novel ways.
  • By the end of this course, students will be able to initiate, manage, complete, and evaluate their independent research projects in stages and to give and receive constructive feedback through the peer review process.

Topical Outline

  • The uses of intellectual history
  • Contrasting approaches: Contextualism and the alternatives
  • The question of national variations
  • The special challenges of twentieth-century European intellectual history
  • Conflicting background traditions: The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and historicism
  • Liberalism, democracy, socialism, and the changing political framework
  • The place of Marxism
  • Positivism, the revolt against positivism, and the cultural role of science
  • The advent of irrational mass politics
  • Rational and non-rational in individual and society
  • Durkheim, anomie, and the scope for enhanced social integration
  • Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and the critique of parliamentary democracy
  • The revision of Marxism: myth, will, and values
  • Georges Sorel: myth, the non-rational, and the scope for societal renewal
  • The legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Societal values and the question of individuality
  • André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902) and the search for the “real self”
  • Towards the sexual side of the self
  • Sigmund Freud and the Viennese context
  • Freud on the place of the non-rational and the need for rational mastery
  • The limits of political action and the premium on therapy and adjustment
  • Max Weber: The non-rationality of values and the ambiguities of modern secular society
  • New experience and artistic modernism
  • From impressionism to cubism and expressionism
  • Toward De Stijl and Surrealism: completing the revolution in painting
  • Modern art and the audience; the innovations of Futurism
  • "Primitivism," cultural relativism, and the new interest in non-Western art
  • Intellectual enthusiasm for war
  • Dada and the assault on cultural respectability
  • After the Great War: Cultural pessimism and the limits to progress
  • Innovation and tradition in the effort to come to terms with World War I
  • The new European context: Communism, fascism, and the expanded political spectrum
  • European fascism and intellectual history: The cases of Giovanni Gentile and Martin Heidegger
  • The charge of intellectual betrayal Gropius, the Bauhaus, and the search for a socially constructive art
  • The Bauhaus as controversial symbol of modernity in Weimar Germany
  • Contrasting images of "American" modernity
  • For and against mass culture
  • Ortega as disillusioned liberal insights and blind spots in "the generation of 1914"
  • The search for cultural bearings after World War II
  • Existentialism, Marxism, “Americanism,” and the return to tradition
  • The uses of religious tradition
  • Diagnoses of the contemporary problem from religious and traditionalist perspectives
  • Theater of the absurd and the search for new modes of expression
  • The competing traditions in philosophy ("continental" and "analytical")
  • Existentialism: "thrownness," anxiety, authenticity
  • The vogue of Sartre and Camus after World War II
  • Absurdity, rebellion, and the regrounding of human values in Camus
  • Intellectuals and the Cold War
  • From existentialism to structuralism
  • After “the two cultures”: changes in the intellectual agenda during the 1960s
  • Hermeneutics, poststructuralism, and deconstruction
  • Unearthing systems of power
  • "The other Europe": Intellectuals in the communist countries after World War II
  • Decaying totalitarianism and wider modern "totalist" tendencies
  • Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and the scope for living the truth
  • Disillusionment and cynicism in light of the twentieth-century experience
  • Rethinking the intersections of the personal, the political, and the historical
  • Criticism, disruption, and the scope for reconstruction
  • Reviewing the role of intellectuals in light of Havel and Kundera
  • The idea of "post-modernism"
  • The importance of intellectuals: leadership and waywardness
  • Cultural proportions revisited
  • Outstanding issues in European intellectual history into the twenty-first century

Institutional Competencies Learning Outcomes

Analytical Thinking

The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.


Communication

The ability to effectively develop, express, and exchange ideas in written, oral, interpersonal, or visual form.


Critical Thinking

The ability to pursue and comprehensively evaluate information before accepting or establishing a conclusion, decision, or action.


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