In the 19th century, Europe was the crucible for most of the ideas, institutions, and "isms" that now shape the life of our entire planet- nationalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, and the list goes on and on. But where did these ideas come from? How did the particular conditions of Europe between the French Revolution and the First World War shape these thinkers' ideas, the thoughts of their critics, the progress of the debates that went on between them, and the wider hearing that all received? Over the course of 24 sweeping lectures, Professor Kramer invites you to view intellectual history as a series of overlapping, interconnected dialogues, which will help you deepen your understanding of the ideas of influential 19th-century European intellectuals; reflect on the interactions between ideas and social experience; and think critically and creatively about how the ideas of 19th-century Europe's leading thinkers and writers still raise a host of cogent questions for our own time. You will examine not only famous thinkers like Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche, but a number of important, though less well-remembered, figures including the romantic author Germaine de Staël, the positivist Auguste Comte, the novelist and feminist George Sand, the political theorist Benjamin Constant, and many others-each placed in a context and linked both to other creative thinkers and the major issues of the time. Beginning the legacy of the 18th-century Enlightenment and its connection to the French Revolution and ending with the philosophy of Nietzsche, this ambitious course is rich with great-and lasting-ideas.
European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century
01: What is Intellectual History?
The heart of this course is an exploration of how social experience interacts with the history of thought. Each shapes the other in myriad complex ways. The task of the intellectual historian is to make clear precisely how that happens.
02: The Scientific Origins of the Enlightenment
The story of the European mind in the 19th century emerged as a dialogue with the 18th-century Enlightenment. What were the key themes? Why was modern science so seminal? How did its influence come to be so widely felt?
03: The Emergence of the Modern Intellectual
The modern "intellectual" is a creation of the Enlightenment even though the first such thinkers pre-dated the word. What was the project shared by philosophes and citizens of the "Republic of Letters" such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire?
04: The Cultural Meaning of the French Revolution
For nearly every 19th-century European writer and theorist, the French Revolution was the event. Ironically, the Revolution both expressed Enlightenment ideas and raised large, still-lingering questions about the Enlightenment's validity and legacy.
05: The New Conservatism in Post-Revolutionary Europe
Modern conservatism arose as a critique of the Revolutionary and Enlightenment abstractions. This lecture discusses the influential conservative ideas of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, both of whom argued for the value of European traditions.
06: The New German Philosophy
If France is the home of the Enlightenment, then Germany is the home of the philosophical reaction against it. Herder, Fichte, and others created a potent blend of philosophical idealism and nationalism that would sweep the continent in nationalist opposition to Napoleon's conquests.
07: Hegel’s Philosophical Conception of History
The most influential German philosopher of the early 19th century, Hegel (d. 1831) authored a complex body of ideas that explained how every historical event could hold philosophical meaning.
08: The New Liberalism
By comparing the ideas of the Englishman Jeremy Bentham and the Frenchman Benjamin Constant, you gain insight into the differences that began to emerge early on to divide British and French liberalism.
09: The Literary Culture of Romanticism
Why have historians increasingly turned to literature, and especially Romantic works, in order to understand 19th-century European ideas? How do Romantics such as Schelling, Madame de Staël, and Lord Byron both reject and rely on the Enlightenment?
10: The Meaning of the “Romantic Hero”
The romantic hero, now a cultural cliché, was once a fresh response to a world in which the traditional aristocracy was fading. How does this hero emerge in the figures of Goethe's young Werther, Chateaubriand's René, and Victor Hugo's Hernani?
11: The Industrial Revolution and Classical Economics
The growth of cities and industry interested social theorists first in Great Britain, where works on "political economy" by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and to an extent the population theories of Thomas Malthus as well, laid a basis for modern economics.
12: Early Critiques of Industrial Capitalism
Romantics and socialists (prominent among them Robert Owen, Henri Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier) criticized laissez-faire capitalism and expounded a vision of a new and more cooperative socialist society.
13: Hegelianism and the Young Marx
Karl Marx, early "multiculturalist?" The answer is yes, in a sense, as this analysis of Marx's early life and debts to Left Hegelianism and the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach makes clear.
14: Marx’s Social Critique
Marx studied both French political theory and English economic thought, but found each wanting in historical consciousness. Hegelianism was historical, but abstract. Marx drew from each of these three European intellectual traditions to develop a new materialist social theory.
15: Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Culture
Early feminists such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft urged that women should be granted all of the new rights of man. Madame de Staël sought more opportunities for women to participate in the mostly male world of European cultural life.
16: Women’s Rights in a Man’s World
In different ways, the French female novelist George Sand and the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued for extending rights to women. How did they meet the objections of opponents?
17: Tocqueville and Mill—Rethinking Liberal Theory
In On Liberty (1859), Mill optimistically defended liberal principles and institutions as guarantors of progress. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke for many other liberals who were glimpsing darker and more dispiriting possibilities in modern mass society.
18: Nationalisms and National Identities
How did nationalism become the most influential and pervasive "ism" of the modern age? What role did intellectuals such as the French historian Jules Michelet and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz play in the process?
19: The Novel as Art and Social Criticism
The post-Romantic "literary realism" of the novelists Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert concerns itself with the world of bourgeois social relations and the "hollowness" that these artists saw at the heart of so much modern striving.
20: Science and Its Literary Critics
Here you meet Auguste Comte and his case for the applicability of rigorous scientific methods and expertise to all of human life. You also weigh the counterclaims made by Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of positivism's most eloquent foes.
21: Charles Darwin and the New Biology
Darwin's theory of evolution fit into a wider cultural tendency to think about nature and culture in terms of evolutionary change. Darwin's thought posed challenges not only for biblical religion, but for Enlightenment humanism as well.
22: The Controversies of Social Darwinism
What were the broader implications of Darwin's ideas? Herbert Spencer saw in "social" Darwinism a key to explaining how the "survival of the fittest" shaped all human social relations. New forms of "scientific" racism helped to justify European imperialism.
23: The Heroic Critic in Mass Society
Responding to the modern tendency to level not only rights and rank but aesthetic, moral, and intellectual standards as well, Thomas Carlyle, Søren Kierkegaard, and Matthew Arnold each sought a role for independent and even heroic individual action.
24: Nietzsche’s Critique of European Culture
Nietzsche took aim not only at Christianity but also at modernity's own cherished faith in science and democracy. With him, the optimism of the 18th century yields at last to ideas that will haunt the 20th century.
About
Dr. Lloyd Kramer is the Dean E. Smith Distinguished Term Professor of History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1986. He earned his B.A. from Maryville College and his M.A. in History from Boston College. He earned his Ph.D. in European Intellectual History from Cornell University. Prior to taking his position at UNC, Professor Kramer held teaching positions at Northwestern University, Stanford University, and Cornell University. At UNC, Dr. Kramer is the recipient of the Johnston Teaching Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching (1997) and the 1993 Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award. He teaches courses on European intellectual history, the history of Western civilization, and modern global history. He has published numerous articles and is the author of Nationalism: Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775-1865 and Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (1996), which received the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the American Society for French Historical Studies and the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
