Ideas Matter: Culture Wars: then and now, episode 5: ‘The crisis of bourgeois ideology’

This lecture on the crisis of bourgeois ideology, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, is a pre-history of today’s culture wars. It explores the broad sweep and trajectory of modernist culture, from the mid nineteenth century through to the interwar years of the 20th century.

LECTURER
Dr Tim Black, books and essays editor, Spiked.

TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST

• Why growing disillusion of Europe’s bourgeois intellectual elite with the values of progress, liberalism and democracy that had been so important in bringing meaning to society.
• The crisis of meaning that fed the Great War as a vitalistic renewal of the German state and the disenchanted bourgeois world of the Anglo-French axis.
• Societal insecurity in Europe after WWI and fatal break by intellectuals with the moralistic guises of the pre-war view of the world and enter a deep mode of self-questioning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
• The Destruction of Reason, Georg Lukács , 1962 (republished Aakar Books, 2016)
• Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, Robert B Pippin, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999

THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.

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