TY - JOUR
AU - Roberts, David
AB - Book reviews 131 Austin Harrington German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge University Press, 2016) Reviewed by: David Roberts, Monash University, Australia DOI: 10.1177/0725513617742480 For Austin Harrington, the intellectual legacy of the Weimar period remains critical to the idea of Europe and the idea of the West today. The conflation of the two – the idea of Europe and the idea of the West – since 1945 is symptomatic of the reductive reading of the Weimar years solely in the light of Hitler’s rise to power. The scale of the European catastrophe lent a retrospective fatality to German history since 1848: Germany’s des- cent into barbarism could only be explained in terms of a fundamental ambivalence to the rapid industrial transformation that destroyed Gemeinschaft, an ambivalence shared by German intellectuals, the ‘mandarins’ of Kultur and Bildung (Fritz Ringer), who washed their hands of political engagement. In short, Weimar, the unhappy product of the First World War, has come to stand for ‘the crisis of classical modernity’ (Detlev Peukert), in which the European nihilism, prophesied by Carlyle, Nietzsche, Burckhardt and Dostoevsky, had finally come to fruition/triumphed. Harrington will have none of this narrative, 
TI - Book review: German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar
JF - Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology
DO - 10.1177/0725513617742480
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/book-review-german-cosmopolitan-social-thought-and-the-idea-of-the-hGraro7l0x
SP - 131
EP - 135
VL - 143
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -