Social Science Research Council

An Avantgardistic Instinct for Relevances: Intellectuals and their Public

The roots of the egalitarian self-understanding of intellectuals in Germany extend back to the first generation after Goethe and Hegel. The restive literati and private lecturers from the circle of Young Germany and of the Left Hegelians nurtured both the image of free-floating, spontaneous, intensely polemi­cal, often maudlin, and unpredictable intellectuals and the prejudices against […]