The Decline of the German Mandarins

Many ideas and concepts still common in the more traditional branches of Humanities belong to the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century. This is also the time when my own field, Semitic Philology, emerged as a professionalized discipline. Fritz Ringer, himself a German-born emigree to the US, provides a rigorous analysis of the social background and self-understanding of German academic elites during that formative period until the collapse of their natural habitat in the catastrophe of the Second World War. His work is a demanding yet rewarding read because it brings to the fore the institutional underpinnings of scholarship. It… show more.