IDEAS, INSTITUTIONS, AND WISSENSCHAFT: ACCOUNTING FOR THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

Extract

Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

In the same symbolic way that the modern political world can be traced to revolutionary Paris, and the modern economic world to industrial Manchester, so modern academia and modern scholarship trace their origins to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. There and then the study of history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, and, somewhat later, the natural sciences was transformed in content and methodology onto the lines that would characterize them until deep into the twentieth century. Some argue that the period from 1770 to 1830 launched a still more fundamental transformation in the very structure of academic knowledge: the creation of modern “disciplines” as the new social and intellectual forms through which knowledge would be classified, produced, and communicated.