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
INTELL HIS MOD EURO
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The principal objective of the course is to teach students to think critically for themselves about the relationships between the past and the present, to learn to ask questions of the past that enable them to understand the present and mold the future, and to become attuned to both the limitations and possibilities of change. The course seeks to acquaint students with the ways in which past societies and peoples have defined the relationships between community and individual needs and goals, and between ethical norms and decision-making. In general students will be expected to: 1. read a wide range of primary and secondary sources critically. 2. polish skills in critical thinking, including the ability to recognize the difference between opinion and evidence, and the ability to evaluate--and support or refute--arguments effectively. 3. write stylistically appropriate and mature papers and essays using processes that include discovering ideas and evidence, organizing that material, and revising, editing, and polishing the finished papers.
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