Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Stimulating and informative. This is an excellent evolutionary view of a unique, significant subject. . . . Highly Recommended." * Choice *
“Johann N. Neem enjoys a sharp historical analysis of why the humanities always seem to be overpromising on what they can do.” * Times Higher Education *
Permanent Crisis is a significant and stimulating book. It offers an account of the philosophical dilemmas of the modern humanities that anyone concerned with the history of humanistic reason will want to contend with. It is filled with provocative readings of both well-known and forgotten figures. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Today, we often hear, the humanities are in a new crisis, threatened by the dual forces of capitalist modernity and the expanding sciences. Yet this notion, argue Reitter and Wellmon, is as old as the research university itself, whose origins they place in 19th-century Germany... The authors’ style is decidedly scholarly, but with tidbits thrown in for more distractable readers, including some amusing academic repartee." * Public Books *
"Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon . . . suggest that today’s preoccupation with crisis in the humanities is historically and conceptually overdetermined, less a response to current material realities than baked into the modern humanities’ self-conception." * Chronicle of Higher Education *
"Anyone considering writing an essay or op-ed on ‘the crisis of the humanities’ ought to read this book first." -- Suzanne L. Marchand, Louisiana State University
"
Permanent Crisis is a magisterial tour-de-force of historical scholarship in the service of a powerful and timely intervention in an issue of widespread contemporary concern and deep significance. It has the potential to alter the debate over the place of the humanities in the modern university." -- Warren G. Breckman, University of Pennsylvania
"Reitter and Wellmon masterfully elucidate what they argue is the signature way humanistic inquiry has participated in the modern research university: through a discourse of crisis and decline, from which it paradoxically derives its purpose and direction. The authors provide an intellectual genealogy for contentious issues in US higher education—professionalization, academic freedom, workplace inclusivity, exploitation of adjunct labor, and much more. A truly instructive study!” -- Rey Chow, author of A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1.The Modern University and the Dream of Intellectual Unity
2. The Lament of the Melancholy Mandarins
3. Philology and Modernity: Nietzsche on Education
4. The Mandarins of the Lab: The Humanities in “the Age of the Natural Sciences”
5. The Consolation of the Modern Humanities
6. Max Weber, Scholarship, and Modern Asceticism
7. Crisis, Democracy, and the Humanities in America
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
