Category Archives: Uncategorized

Habermas on Publicity II (Re: Arendt, Koselleck, and Schmitt)

It is hardly surprising that Immanuel Kant plays a prominent role in Habermas’s discussion of the vicissitudes of what — for reasons that I’ve discussed in a previous post — might best be termed “bourgeois publicity.”  As Habermas notes at … Continue reading

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Publicity & the Public Sphere – Reading Habermas as a Historian of Concepts

As I was getting ready for a discussion of Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in a seminar that I’m teaching on Enlightenment and its Critics, I recalled an incident from the distant past. A colleague returned from … Continue reading

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Deeper into the “Shallow Enlightenment” (Ludwig Tieck, George J. Adler, and Herman Meville)

Before resuming last week’s exploration of the “shallow Enlightenment,” we should take stock of where things stand. What we saw last week was that “shallow” was but one of a number of pejoratives that have been marshaled against the Enlightenment. … Continue reading

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Pursuing the “Shallow Enlightenment” (Part I: Nineteenth-Century Trash-Talk)

In my efforts to make sense of the various pejoratives hurled at the Enlightenment, the one whose depths I’ve yet to plumb is (oddly enough) “shallow.” The term surfaces in a number of places and there’s a lot to be … Continue reading

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If Adorno had an Ngram

I’ve never been good at speculating on what earlier thinkers would have said about later developments. This was driven home to me several years ago when someone who’d bought an audio book on the Enlightenment that I’d been recruited to … Continue reading

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Dreyfus, Dieterle, and Vienna Philharmonic (a Postscript to the Culture Industry)

My plan has been to limit posts on this blog to one a week (and schedule it for Sunday), but two recent articles in the New York Times have a certain relevance for my recent discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s … Continue reading

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Enlightenment as “Mass Deception”? — “Culture Industry” in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

As a sequel to last week’s post on what Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has to do with “the Enlightenment,” I thought it might make sense to consider what, if any, rationale there might be for a discussion of … Continue reading

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