History 3010: Field Readings for



European Intellectual History Field:

“A survey of major themes in modern European philosophy and social and political thought

from the Enlightenment to the post-war era.”

With Professor Peter E. Gordon

Week I: Methodological Considerations: Contexts, Traditions, Perennial Ideas

Peter E. Gordon, “What is Intellectual History?”

theme of contextualism

Primary Readings:

1.(e)Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936), all.

2.(e)Arthur Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas, in Journal of the History of

Ideas, I, 1 (Jan, 1940)

3.(e) Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing” in Persecution and the Art of

Writing (Chicago, repr. 1988)

4.(e)Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and

Theory, 8 (1969)

Week II: Kantian Foundations: Epistemology

Kant’s theory of knowledge: his “Copernican Revolution.”

5.(e) Allen Wood, Kant. Blackwell Great Minds. (Blackwell; Malden, MA: 2005), all.

6.(e) Paul Guyer, “Introduction: The starry heavens and the moral law” in The Cambridge

Companion to Kant

7.(e) Frederick Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development, 1746-1781,” in The Cambridge

Companion to Kant.

8.(e) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Guyer and Wood, Eds (Cambridge), A and

B Prefaces, Introduction.

Students who wish to place Kant’s life against the background of German political developments may wish to consult Rudolf Vierhaus, Germany in the Age of Absolutism (Cambridge, 1988).

Week III: Kant, The Enlightenment, and the Philosophy of History

philosophy of history, political thought. Jürgen Habermas: application of Kant’s theory of public criticism to historical sociology

9.(e)Yirmilahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, 1989)

10.(e)Hans Reiss, Ed. Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge), selections; “Idea for a

Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” (1784)“What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and

“The Contest of the Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is

the Human Race Continually Improving?’”(1798)

11.(e) Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1991): this needs to be read with terrific care, which is why there is not that much reading this week.

Week IV:Hegelianism and German Idealism.

12.(e) Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge, 2002), parts I, II, and III only (though the Hegel chapters).

13.(h) Charles Taylor, Hegel, An Exposition; read through section on master/slave dialectic.

14.(e) G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History(1821-31, p. 1837). Leo Rauch, Ed. (Hackett).

15.(e) G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821), “Preface”

16.(e) G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) (A.V. Miller, trans.), Preface and Introduction, and also “Lordship and Bondage” (pp.111 and ff.)

17.M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton, 1973), skim only.

More advanced is Michael Forster’s book, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago, 1998). Peter’s review-essay, “Self-Authorizing Modernity” in History and Theory Vol. 44, N. 1 (February, 2005), pp.121-137.

Week V:The Counter-Enlightenment (Burke, Isaiah Berlin on the Counter-Enlightenment)

Isaiah Berlin major critic of totalitarianism coined the “counter-Enlightenment”. Berlin deplored system-building, so a worthy successor to Edmund Burke, although seems to have his own “monisms.”

18.(e)Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France(1790) (Penguine, 1982)

19.(e)Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969).

20.(e)Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Ivan Dee, 1993)

Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton, 2000)

21.(h)Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment” and “The Counter-Enlightenment”

in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000).

22.(e)Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2002)

Week VI:From Hegelianism to Marxism

The genesis of Marxian revolutionary theory out of the womb of Hegelianism is one of the most remarkable and paradigmatic cases of continuity-via-discontinuity in modern intellectual history.

23.(e)Terry Pinkard, The Legacy of German Idealism, 1760-1860, concluding portions.

24(h,e)John Toews, Hegelianism, The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism. (Cambridge, 1985), all.

25(h,e)Warren Breckman, Hegel, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge,

1999).

26(e)Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, ch. 1, “Introduction: §1 The

Essential Nature of Man, §2 The Essence of Religion Considered Generally”

27(h)Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “On the Jewish Question”, “The Communist Manifesto”, and all selections from Capital, Vol. 1, found in Tucker, Ed. The Marx-

Engels Reader.(Norton)

Week VII:Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism,

Nietzsche’s method of genealogy has exercised a profound influence on the historical profession, and his early polemic against academic history also deserves close attention.

28(e)Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.

29(e)Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge, 1994)

30(e)Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1974)

31(e)Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, “Dionysian Enlightenment: Walter Kaufmann’s

Nietzsche in Historical Perspective” in Modern Intellectual History ,Volume 3, Issue 02 (August 2006), pp 239-26.

32(gbooks)Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (California, 1994)

Week VIII: Historicism and Conceptions of History (Herder, Heidegger, Dilthey, Windelband)

“Historicism” : evolutionist-organicist theory that ideas begin in nutio and reach their maturity after a long process of growth, and the contextualist-holist theory that regards ideas as organic expressions of a bounded and self-contained culture or “worldview” (Weltanschauung).

33(?Lib)Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (Herder and Herder, 1972)

34(gbooks)Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Wesleyan, 1984)

35(e)Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Cornell, 1995)

36(gbooks)Hans-Peter Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (California, 1975)

37(e)Wilhelm Windelband, “Rectoral Address (History and Natural Science)” translated and reproduced in History and Theory (1980)

Week IX: Weber and the Politics of the Social Sciences in Germany

Max Weber : most influential social theorist of the twentieth century

38(gboooks)Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Wesleyan, 1990)

39(h,e)Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2004)

40(e)Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The Antinomical Structure of Weber’s Thought” in Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber

41(h,e)Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin edition; not the Parsons

translation): also read the polemical debates for a sense of just how vigorously Max could defend

himself when he believed his opponent’s arguments were without merit.

42(e)Max Weber, “’Objectivity’ in Social Science,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Finch and Shils (Free Press, 1949)

43(h)Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” and “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Girth and Mills (Oxford, 1958)

Week X:Psychoanalysis and History (Freud)

44(gbooks)Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (New York: Norton, 1988)

45(h)Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

46(e?)Sigmund Freud, “Resistances to Psychoanalysis” in Freud, (1925). The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id

and Other Works, pp. 211-224.

47(o)William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Cornell, 1986)

48(e)John Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in his Time and for our Time” The Journal of

Modern History. Vol. 63, No. 3 (Sep., 1991), pp. 504-545.

Week XI: Weimar Thought (Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin), Carl Schmitt, Heidegger & Cassirer)

The interwar period remains one of the richest sources for our understanding of German social theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism.

50(h,e)Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Little, Brown, 1973; California, 1996)

51(h)Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Harper and Row, 1968)

52(h)Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard, 2010)

53(h)Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford edition only), all.

54(e)Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (MIT, 1985)

55(e)Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 2007)

56(h)Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” and

“On the Concept of History,” in Illuminations (Schocken).

57(e)Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third

Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). [reactionary and embracing technology]

58(e)John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology

(Cambridge, 1997)

Week XII: Existentialism in Germany and France (Heidegger, Sartre)

59(h)Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” and “Letter on Humanism” both in Heidegger, Basic

Writings (Routledge, 2008)

60(e)Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis” (The New York Review of Books).

61(e)Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (Yale, 2007)

62(e)Edward Baring, “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’s Struggle for

Existentialism in Postwar France” in Modern Intellectual History. Vol. 7 (2010), 581-609.

63(e)Hans Sluga [political philosopher], Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard, 1995)

64(?Lib?)Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in 20th Century France (Cornell, 1988)

65(e)Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton, 1977)

66(e)Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France (Cornell, 2007)

Week 13: Structuralism and the Human Sciences in France (Durkheim, Mauss, Levi-Strauss)

In this week we will look at the tradition of French sociology and anthropology that stretches from Durkheim through Mauss to Lévi-Strauss.

67(e)Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Modern Society. (trans. Lewis Coser) (Free Press, 1997);

68(h)Émile Durkheim, Suicide

69(h)Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2008)

70(h)Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (Norton, 2000)

71(e)Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University Of Chicago, 1968).

72(gbooks)Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked.

73(kindle)(Gary Gutting’s French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2001)

Week 14: Foucault and Contemporary French Thought

Michel Foucault has enjoyed a powerful influence in the historical discipline, more than any other thinker in the French tradition after 1968.

Primary Readings:

74(e)Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (abridged edition), all.

75(e)Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage, 1994)

76(h)Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Vintage, )

77(h)Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: Introduction. (Vintage, 1990)

78(gbooks)Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought.

79(?)Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (Other Press, 2006).

80(e)Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Northwestern)

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