Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer's "Spirit and System" exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced German's conceptions of modernity and national culture. Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness" - that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life - is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.
- ISBN10 0226068919
- ISBN13 9780226068916
- Publish Date 1 December 2005 (first published 15 November 2005)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 288
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780226068916