Impudent claims and loathsome questions: intellectual history as judgment of the past -- Historical explanation and the event: reflections on the limits of contextualization -- Intention and irony: the missed encounter between Hayden White and Quentin Skinner -- Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin: modes of Jewish intellectual life in the twentieth century -- Against rigor: Hans Blumenberg on Freud and Arendt -- "Hey! What's the big idea?": ruminations on the question of scale in intellectual history -- Fidelity to the event? Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness and the Russian Revolution -- Can photographs lie? Reflections on a perennial anxiety -- Sublime historical experience, real presence, and photography -- The heroism of modern life and the sociology of modernization: Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel -- Historical truth and the truthfulness of historians -- Theory and philosophy: antonyms in our semantic field? -- The weaponization of free speech
Summary:
"There is no more contentious and perennial issue in modern thought than the vexed relationship between an idea's genesis and its claim to transcendent validity. It is at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals with ideas and the intellectuals who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. These essays by an internationally recognized figure in the field address the issue in new and arresting ways"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.