Evento

The Great War and the Modern World: Cultural Death and Radical Hope

By tracing the post- 1914 transformation of the legacy of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Professor Toews will examine how the critical intellectual traditions of the central European fin-de-siècle were recreated and transfigured in the shadow of catastrophe. Toews will place Nietzsche's legacy in the context of contemporaneous developments within the intellectual traditions of Marxism and psychoanalysis, showing how disillusionment with the foundational myths of Western humanism and historicism produced widespread commitment to the radical cultural construction of a "New Man" and new "World Order," a commitment that ultimately culminated in the fascist regimes of the 1920s and 1930s.

John Toews is the Joff Hanauer Distinguished University Professor for Western Civilization and Professor of History and the Comparative History of Ideas. He teaches courses in modern European intellectual history and his most recent book is Becoming Historical:Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. He is currently finishing a book on the early history of psychoanalysis.

For more information about the History Lecture Series and to purchase series passes, please visit the series homepage.