Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On the growing challenges early modern education reformers claimed (and overpromised) the humanities could address:

The humanities came to stand in for the contradictions and tensions that, as we have traced in this chapter, characterized nineteenth-century liberal education or allgemeine Bildung: tensions between method, research, and ways of knowing on the one hand and ethos, teaching, and questions of how to live on the other. The scholars who helped establish “the humanities” as a distinct institutional domain within the modern university and identified themselves with it gradually claimed (and sometimes gained) a monopoly over these questions and concerns, especially as other scholars (natural and physical scientists in particular) began to regard such questions as outside their own domains (witness Pinker). Yet the academics who did so much to make the humanities possible within universities also inherited all of the contradictions and confusions that beset Diesterweg in the 1830s. (p. 79-80).

My first blush thought on this is that focusing on humanities stakeholders overpromising intellectual unity allows for side-stepping the issue of disenchantment (the loss of “magic” as Max Weber might phrase it). In this chapter they do briefly address figures like Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory, but brush them aside pretty quickly.

Is the unifying promise they address really a sign of hubris when the pre-Enlightenment world (particularly in Europe) had a unifying meta-narrative that underpinned intellectual life?