Browse

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This book brings together historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud's legacy in the United States in the century since his visit. There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud's life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud's work had significant intellectual and social impact. The book provides readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans' psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century.

In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus' spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. This book overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus' criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus' modernist journalistic style. It situates Kraus' writings in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. The author argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus' attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—he explains their admiration for Kraus' project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct in countless cultural and historical contexts, especially during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radical pamphleteers and theorists repeatedly represented their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does this figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? This book explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. Political slavery, whether civil or national, is, it shows, frequently paired with its antagonist, political tyranny. The book tackles political slavery's discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. The author proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Buchanan, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings. She argues that “antityranny discourse”—originating in democratic Athens, adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe—provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges, or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder.

This book is a study of linguistics and its neighboring disciplines--psychology, logic, and philosophy--from ca. 1840 up until 1940 and the outbreak of World War II, that aims to give the reader an entirely new sense of where these disciplines came from and what their impact has been on the way we think about language and thought today. The central questions studied concern the nature of continuity and rupture, both in the world of ideas and in the political, social, and historical world in which we live. The over-arching vision that informs the book assumes that we are all part of an ongoing conversation on the nature of mind and thought that was carried out in many geographical and disciplinary venues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--and how the vast majority of researchers in these mind sciences are oblivious as to where the ideas that they use came from. The field of linguistics lies at the center of this account because the study of language has been at the crossroads of psychology, philosophy, and logic throughout the 100-year period covered by the book. Linguistics has emerged in a radically changed form, with little memory of its earlier concern for philology and for principles of proper grammar, and a pride in being the most scientific of the social sciences. It is the history of those who have shaped the field of linguistics, and how the larger social and intellectual forces have led the discipline to the form that it takes today.

This book provides an account of the emergence of the concept of territory in Western political thought. It does so primarily through a contextualised reading of the texts of that tradition with one key question: what is the relation between place and power? It is therefore historical in its execution, philosophical in its interrogation of texts, and political and geographical in its significance. Taking a broad historical period—Ancient Greece to the seventeenth century—it traces the relation between politics and place in a range of different texts and contexts. This historical period looks at the key moments that led to the formation of our modern concepts. The book shows in detail how elements from classical, medieval and renaissance thought differ from our own time, and yet how they came together, were reread in new situations, and were transformed to give the idea of territory we have today. It addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

The Chattering Mind shows how a characteristically unproblematic form of modern communication—everyday talk—became a communication problem in itself, notably one in need of careful conceptual commentary and now, in the digital age, ongoing technological support. Part One focuses on Søren Kierkegaard’s inaugural theory of “chatter,” paying special attention to the concept’s literary and philosophical origins, its early entanglement with modern democratic culture, and its corresponding annex of mid-nineteenth-century religious discourse. Part Two explores Martin Heidegger’s subsequent work on “idle talk” and several related terms, notably “babble,” “scribbling,” and “everyday discourse.” It shows how his development of these terms in the early-1920s not only served as a biting social critique of the university system in which he was struggling to secure a professorship, but also allowed him to elaborate a theory of discourse that would eventually culminate in the existential analytic of Being and Time. Part Three considers Jacques Lacan’s elusive notion of “empty speech” alongside its linguistic counter-possibility, “full speech,” reading both terms against the backdrop of his radical postwar return to the founding moment of psychoanalytic theory and technique: Freud’s iconic 1895 dream of Irma’s injection. By way of conclusion, The Chattering Mind suggests that the conceptual history of everyday talk which stretches from Kierkegaard’s notion of chatter to Heidegger’s theory of idle talk to Lacan’s treatment of empty speech also extends into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms has now become the basis for big data in the hands of tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

This book updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come increasingly under fire. At the same time, in the wake of 9/11, the Right and the Left continue to wage war over the utility of an absolute vision of free speech in a time of increased national security. The book revisits the tangled history of free speech, finding resolutions to these debates hidden at the very roots of the liberal tradition. An account of the role of public communication in the Anglo-American world, it shows that liberty's earliest advocates recognized its fraternal relationship with wickedness and evil. While we understand freedom of expression to mean “anything goes,” the author asks why its advocates so often celebrate a sojourn in hell and the overcoming of suffering. He directs us to such well-known sources as the prose and poetry of John Milton and the political and philosophical theory of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as well as lesser-known sources such as the theology of Paul of Tarsus. In various ways they all, the author shows, envisioned an attitude of self-mastery or self-transcendence as a response to the inevitable dangers of free speech, a troubled legacy that continues to inform ruling norms about knowledge, ethical responsibility, and democracy today. A world of gigabytes, undiminished religious passion, and relentless scientific discovery calls for a fresh account of liberty that recognizes its risk and its splendor. Instead of celebrating noxious doctrine as proof of society's robustness, this book invites us to rethink public communication today by looking more deeply into the unfathomable mystery of liberty and evil.

The story of the emergence of modern humanity needs to take account of cultural and biological evolution, as well as the interaction of the two; it must describe a biocultural evolution. Culture and the Course of Human Evolution advances a new model for our emergence from earlier hominins, one that incorporates an innovative view of its cultural aspects. It joins an analysis of culture in its broadest and deepest elements, as they are manifested in nonhuman animals today and were present in our distant ancestors, to the latest approaches to biological evolution. It describes how cultural changes among our ancestors extended the capacities found in many animals to interpret their worlds through signs, and it details how this growing semiotic complexity led to emergent, systematic cultural structures that boosted late hominins beyond the attainments of other animals. These structures in turn entered into the mechanisms of natural selection, forming unprecedented dynamics in them. The model of biocultural evolution described here casts new light on the latest findings of Paleolithic archaeologists, offering a solution to the puzzle that stands at the heart of our deep history: the dramatic growth over the last 250,000 years in the powers of humans to construct their niches, alter their environments, and shift the impact of selective pressures on them.

From antiquity through the Enlightenment, disasters were attributed to the obscure power of the stars or the vengeance of angry gods. As philosophers sought to reassess the origins of natural disasters, they also made it clear that humans shared responsibility for the damages caused by a violent universe. This far-ranging book explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today. It argues that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency which made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy. From the plague of 1720 to the cholera of 1832, from shipwrecks to film dystopias, disasters raise questions about identity and memory, technology, control, and liability. In her analysis, the author considers anew the mythical figures of Medusa and Apollo, theories of epidemics, earthquakes, political crises, and films such as Blow-Up and Blade Runner.

Once dubbed a city of “festering merchants” where poets went to die, Hamburg was, by all accounts, an improbable setting for a major movement in the humanities. Yet through its mercantile spirit of openness and its civic tradition of cultural philanthropy, this “second city” on Germany’s periphery had important implications for Weimar cultural and intellectual history. This book shows how the scholars Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky emerged from a unique combination of factors, including a new university, family networks, Jewishness, and urban life. It also traces the institutional development of the Warburg library, in which these scholars were active, to their divergent post-war receptions in the English-speaking world. These scholars have received increased attention in recent years for their contributions to the fields of art history and philosophy. But Hamburg, Dreamland of Humanists is the first book to consider their historical significance taken together in the time and place where their ideas took form. On one hand, the book sheds light on the intellectual impulses of these scholars’ work on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. On the other, it argues that their scholarship clarifies the familial, political, and economic pressures characteristic of the German-Jewish scholar in twentieth-century Hamburg. Insofar as these scholars were themselves engaged in understanding the origins of ideas, Hamburg, Dreamland of Humanists fittingly re-examines how context can be both constructive and destructive for cultural and intellectual history and the role that context might—and should play—in our analysis of ideas.

A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. was one of Europe's most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era, publishing more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. However, Kircher is most famous—or infamous—for his quixotic attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions they encoded. In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, he published his solution to the hieroglyphs, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a work that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” Here the author presents a new interpretation of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, he shows how Kircher's study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilizations. Along with other participants in the rise of Oriental studies, Kircher aimed to revolutionize the study of the past by mastering Near Eastern languages and recovering ancient manuscripts hidden away in the legendary libraries of Cairo and Damascus. The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance hermetic tradition. The author argues against this view, showing how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in European intellectual history.

With the prevalence of smartphones, massive data storage, and search engines, we might think of today as the height of the information age. In reality, every era has faced its own challenges of storing, organizing, and accessing information. While they lacked digital devices, our ancestors, when faced with information overload, utilized some of the same techniques that underlie our modern interfaces: they visualized and spatialized data, tying it to the emotional and sensory spaces of memory, thereby turning their minds into a visual interface for accessing information. Excavating the Memory Palace mines the history of Europe’s arts of memory to find the origins of today’s data visualizations, unearthing how ancient constructions of cognitive pathways paved the way for modern technological interfaces. Looking to techniques like the memory palace, the book finds the ways that information has been tied to sensory and visual experience, turning raw data into lucid knowledge. It explores the ancestry of the visual cyberscape and unveils the history of memory as a creative act.

Spanning both the history of the modern West and the author's own five-decade journey as a historian, this essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria. This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, the author has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. The book was composed between 1953 and 2005, and includes a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the wildly divergence between patients. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of concepts became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

The book traces the origins of the intellectual property concept across a millennium-plus history of the learned book in the West. It seeks to inform current debates over scholarly publishing by asking what it is about the cultures and institutions of learning that gave rise to this sense of a text constituting an intellectual property, even as these works often acquired in these learned settings a distinctive legal and economic standing compared to other sorts of property. The book begins with Saint Jerome and what was, in effect, his monastic publishing house in the fifth century, before going on to trace other relevant reading, writing, and editing practices in monasteries, schools, universities, and among independent scholars through the medieval period and into the early modern era. It delves into the influx of Islamic learning and the rediscovery of classical texts, the origins of the universities, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the founding of the Bodleian Library, and the struggle of the university presses, before finally arriving at John Locke, whose theory of property proved a touchstone of intellectual property jurisprudence, while his influential lobbying contributed to learning’s privileged place in the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne of 1710. The path followed by this book is intended to put the tensions felt within universities today, between the pursuit of marketable intellectual property and the ideals of open science, into this larger historical context, making apparent the dangers that commercial interests can pose to the intellectual properties of learning.

This book delivers a reworking of the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book introduces new energy to the field of print studies, leading to considerable new avenues of investigation.

W. Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a preeminent black scholar and pioneer within social science. His empirical investigations into race and class inequality, the system of Jim Crow, and the cultural biases within intelligence testing were groundbreaking. As one of the first black anthropologists in the country, as well as the first African American appointed full-time to a predominantly-white university (University of Chicago, in 1942), Davis confronted America’s color line firsthand. His work had tangible effects of public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and testing practices within schools. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who left such an extensive body of work—having published several notable books and countless articles—such marginalization is particularly arresting. But it is also instructive. Institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking combined to sideline him. A close look at his career therefore sheds light on not only on the racial politics of the academy, but also the costs of being an innovator. Equally important, Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing mainstream American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of inequality more deftly than most of his white peers. By pushing social science in bold new directions, he laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement. His example makes clear the vital role of ideas within the larger black freedom struggle.

During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? This book tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what the book calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime.

The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians, and shaped artists’ and mapmakers’ visual vocabularies for thousands of years. According to Veronica della Dora, mantle is the “metaphor par excellence, for it unfolds between the seen and the unseen as a threshold and as a point of tension.” The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor is an intellectual history of the term mantle and its metaphorical representation in art and literature, geography and cartography. Through the history of this metaphor from antiquity to the modern day, we learn about shifting perceptions and representations of global space and of the nature of geography itself.

The Naked Truth is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the body in the long Viennese fin de siècle (1870–1938). Though often described in terms of a fascination with the psyche, modernist cultural production in Vienna was also uniquely attuned to the body. This book recovers the forgotten history of the human body in Viennese modernism, recasting the era’s visual, literary, and performative cultures through a focus on the corporeal. In charting the complex interplay of the physical and the aesthetic, it proposes an alternative genealogy for and a new interpretation of Viennese modernism. This book traces the origins of Viennese modernism’s materialism to the second Vienna medical school, whose materialist conception of disease revolutionized the field of anatomy in the second half of the 1800s, a full generation before Vienna became the hothouse for Freudian psychoanalysis. It follows the results of this materialist influence across a broad range of cultural forms—exhibitions, literature, portraiture, dance, film, and more. The study moreover reclaims popular culture as a key site of Viennese modernist cultural production, redresses a conspicuous gender and class gap in prior historiography, and recovers the important legacy of figures and genres considered peripheral until now. Its analysis extends to the biopolitics of “Red Vienna” in the First Austrian Republic.