Papers by Gerald Izenberg
The Journal of Modern History, Mar 1, 2023
The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 2004
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 2003
Page 1. GERALD N. IZEN BERG MODERNISM & MASCULINITY MANN, WEDEKIND, KANDIHSKY THROUCH WOR... more Page 1. GERALD N. IZEN BERG MODERNISM & MASCULINITY MANN, WEDEKIND, KANDIHSKY THROUCH WORLD WAR I Page 2. Modernism and Masculinity Page 3. Page 4. Modernism and Masculinity Mann,Wedekind ...
Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 1998
This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of higher e... more This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Julie A. Reuben takes as her focus the fracturing of the nineteenth-century faith in the unity of truth by a series of developments that ultimately led intellectuals to associate truth with value-free science and social science and to relegate moral questions to the margins of intellectual life in the university. In the process of telling this story, Reuben illuminates a broad range of intellectual, cultural, and organizational changes that together created a distinctly modern university. Reuben sees the transformation of higher education as the ironic result of efforts of intellectuals and educational leaders to preserve a place for morality while trying to accommodate the needs of both science and economic development. The process unfolded in three stages: 1) From roughly 1880 to 1910, educators tried to make religion and science compatible by reforming religion, moving away from narrow denominational positions, and promoting a scientific study of religion. 2) From 1900 to 1920, they discarded the centrality of religion and tried to establish secular sources of morality, with many believing that science itself would promote social reform and preserve traditional moral values. 3) From roughly 1915 to 1930, as scientists grew insistent on the value-free nature of their enterprise, educators worked to create a place for morality in the humanities and in the extracurriculum. Reuben argues that the split between truth and morality was effectively codified in the 1930s by logical positivism, which proclaimed the meaninglessness of value statements in science and social science, and by emotivist ethics, which emphasized the emotional rather than the cognitive dimension of ethical decisions. From the first, however, Reuben believes that the separation of knowledge and morality has bred a kind of uneasiness among academics, an uneasiness that is now beginning to surface powerfully in "disciplines ranging from the philosophy and history of science to postmodern literary criticism" (p. 268). Reuben's sweeping study does not replace two other monumental works on the transformation of higher education, but it does take issue with them on important matters. Reuben disputes Laurence R. Veysey's claim in The Emergence of the American University (1965) that ideals of research, utility, and liberal cultural competed with each other; instead, she argues, educators believed in all three ideals and tried to find a place for each of them in the modern university. Reuben finds less fault in George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (1994) but offers a subtly different account of secularization, one that focuses less on the rise of liberal Protestantism than on the failed effort to make religion and science compatible. Reuben will be faulted by some for making sweeping claims about higher education on the basis of a fairly narrow institutional focus (she studies only eight major research universities). Such an approach inevitably leaves many important stories untold. Yet Reuben is interested primarily in capturing the cutting edge of educational developments, and she has managed to do this magnificently. This is an extraordinary piece of scholarship -conceptually rich, wonderfully documented, gracefully written, and very likely to become a classic in both educational and intellectual history.
The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 2001
Otto Weininger Sex, Science, And Self In Imperial Vienna Chandak Sengoopta T urn-of-the century V... more Otto Weininger Sex, Science, And Self In Imperial Vienna Chandak Sengoopta T urn-of-the century Vienna is remembered as an aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual won-derland: the birthplace of Freud and psycho-analysis, the waltz, and novels of Schnitzler. However, as Chandak ...
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Jul 1, 2008
... teenager in the Art Academy. The lion of the Viennese art scene, Klimt had opened the way to ... more ... teenager in the Art Academy. The lion of the Viennese art scene, Klimt had opened the way to the artistic exploration of contemporary female sexuality and to the darker, more pessimistic side of life. For the young adolescent, Klimt's ...
Modern Intellectual History, Aug 1, 2008
The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent... more The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and group psychology only through Erik Erikson's work in the 1950s and its extension to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations. For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Oct 1, 2011
It is a cliché—which is not to say that it is untrue— that the modern chapter in the Western hist... more It is a cliché—which is not to say that it is untrue— that the modern chapter in the Western history of the self is the story of the emergence of the autonomous individual, with his/her rights and desires, as both ultimate truth and value. Both religious and secular can agree on this, however differently they may find the value of the individual. But on the question of what exactly the individual self “is” there is less consensus. Furthermore, the issues involved have changed over time; the definition of the modern self has its own history. If we agree that our current conception of universal individual rights first appeared in the Enlightenment, from their religiously founded political conception in John Locke to their metaphysical–ethical foundation in Kant, and if we see Adam Smith as the thinker who first broached the idea of the individual’s material self-interest as the source of the wealth of nations, it is also true that it took the political revolutions of the eighteenth century to translate individual rights and interests into political goals and concrete institutions. It was with the American and especially the French revolutions that the modern argument about the nature of the self began. Its most exalted version came quickly on the heels of the French Revolution. As government came to be seen not as an imposed alien externality but rather as the embodiment of the people’s will and purpose, Romantic literature and philosophy claimed that this was but one manifestation of the essential nature of the self. The self strove to make the whole of creation its own by finding human use and meaning in everything. The essential thrust of human consciousness and will was to overcome the initial “otherness” of the cosmos through subjective appropriation, thus making it a recognizable home for humanity. Human freedom was an infinite reaching out, a creative striving like that ascribed to the divinity in traditional religion. By embracing all, it aspired to be the All. Almost immediately, however, the grandiosity of the claims for the self seemed to the Romantics to turn into justification of murder and destruction during the revolution. Most first-generation Romantics retreated from what they now saw as dangerously false claims for the self’s virtual divinity. Instead they arrived at a contradictory synthesis in which the infinite creativity of the self depended on its fusion with a totality other than and greater than the merely human, whether nature, the All, the state, or the eternal feminine. Where the infinite was figured as nation or empire, this move could and did have conservative political consequences, but truly consistent Romanticism remained a primarily literary movement because the self as the Romantics conceived it had to remain fictive or notional. As a striving for infinity or totality, the Romantic self was unrealizable in the world except in the imagination, as abstraction or allegory, or as a story of infinite longing that could never be fulfilled this side of dreams or death.
Nineteenth-century French Studies, 2010
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Oct 1, 2011
Moderated by Robert Hanna (University of Colorado), historians Gerald Izenberg (Washington Univer... more Moderated by Robert Hanna (University of Colorado), historians Gerald Izenberg (Washington University, St. Louis) and Jerrold Seigel (New York University), philosopher Raymond Martin (University of Maryland and Union College), and sociologist Norbert Wiley (University of Illinois) trace the evolution of the meaning of self from antiquity to the present and consider how the self described by classical philosophers matches the reality of what we know about ourselves from human experience and research.
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1998
Modern Intellectual History, Jun 8, 2017
If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of "sel... more If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of "self," the place to go is Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self. It is a wide-ranging, deeply insightful account of Western thinking about the nature of selfhood in Britain, France, and Germany since Descartes, framed by a powerfully argued thesis about the right way to conceptualize it. But that project was driven by what in the retrospect of Seigel's whole body of work can be seen as an even more comprehensive historical program, one both methodological and substantive. One of Seigel's basic historiographical convictions, more implicit than systematically argued, is that individual subjectivity matters for historical explanation. His broader substantive interest is in the meaning of the Western notion of "modernity," above all in its implications and consequences for our contemporary self-understanding. Methodological conviction and substantive interest are tightly interwoven. As Seigel sees it, the process of European modernization was guided by, and in turn further developed, a historically locatable, complex, and internally conflicted version of universal selfhood-the autonomous bourgeois self. His corpus is an extended and evolving exploration of this process and its result, which he finds most clearly documented in European thought and culture from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. Seigel's position on the importance of the individual for historical explanation might seem old-fashioned but for the fact that it neither precludes nor comes at the expense of social and cultural explanation. Quite the contrary: Seigel's "self" is unavoidably shaped by social forces, since, as The Idea of the Self explicitly argued, one of its basic characteristics is sociality. But by the same token social forces only operate as historical determinants when internalized by individuals to become personal motives. No individual motive, no social action. Or, as Seigel put it in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, a work devoted not to individuals but to the rise of concrete networks such as railroads and postal services which made possible long-distance communication in commerce, politics and culture, Networks extend, amplify, and invigorate human activity, but they are not in themselves the source of the subjective agency that sets this activity in motion; that source lies in terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Modern Intellectual History, Oct 10, 2005
In recent decades, questions surrounding the concept of the “self,” whether by that name or such ... more In recent decades, questions surrounding the concept of the “self,” whether by that name or such cognate terms as “subjectivity” or “identity,” have come to occupy a prominent place in historical scholarship, literary and gender studies, social theory and philosophy. Most recently, Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self has provided not only a vast new historical map of this conceptual terrain but a challenging new way of exploring it. My purpose here is to examine both, and the thematic and methodological questions they raise for this major contemporary field of inquiry.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1971
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Papers by Gerald Izenberg