Spirit and System

by Boyer, Dominic

• ISBN13: 9780226068916
• ISBN10: 0226068919
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer'sSpirit and Systemexposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced Germans' conceptions of modernity and national culture. Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness"that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.

Author Biography

Dominic Boyer is assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(18)
1. Conceptualizing the Formation of Dialectical Social Knowledge	19	(27)
2. The Bildungsbürgertum and the Dialectics of Germanness in the Long Nineteenth Century	46	(53)
3. Dialectical Politics of Cultural Redemption in the Third Reich and the GDR	99	(61)
4. Self, System, and Other in Eastern Germany after 1989	160	(70)
5. Dialectical Knowledges of the Contemporary: Formal and Informal	230	(41)
Conclusion	271	(12)
Key Terms	283	(4)
Bibliography	287	(22)
Index	309