That the academic humanities have been in “crisis” since the 2007-9 recession is a piece of received wisdom that The Chronicle, along with academic journals like Profession and national newspapers like The New York Times, has had a hand in consolidating. And no one would deny that hiring has been severely constrained — in some fields, all but eliminated — over the last decade or so. But at its most provocative, crisis talk goes beyond a jobs report; it is concerned, for better or for worse, with questions of meaning, legitimacy, and mission.
In Permanent Crisis, just out from the University of Chicago Press, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, professors of German, respectively, at Ohio State University and the University of Virginia, suggest that today’s preoccupation with crisis in the humanities is historically and conceptually overdetermined, less a response to current material realities than baked into the modern humanities’ self-conception. For the authors’ purposes, the humanities in their current institutional form are a product of the German-language universities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, rather than the terminus of a lineage from the Renaissance or antiquity. Germanophone humanists established a set of binaries that continue to structure the modern humanities, “pitting the utilitarian, technical, and vocational rationality of the sciences against the disinterested, liberal, and critical humanities.”
Perhaps the earliest articulation of this worldview appeared in Friedrich Schiller’s 1789 University of Jena lecture, “What Is Universal History and Why Study It?” As Reitter and Wellmon summarize, Schiller “used the study of history to consider a … threat facing the university: an instrumental and utilitarian relationship to education and knowledge among students — and faculty.” Against the so-called Brotgelehrter — which Reitter and Wellmon translate as “careerist scholar” — Schiller counterpoised the truly “philosophical mind.” Put schematically: The human sciences would become the repository for a set of idealist impulses thought to countervail the alienating rationality of industrial modernity.
We talked recently with Reitter and Wellmon about the history of crisis talk, the lessons of Max Weber, the humanities outside the university, and whether the current crisis might truly be different from past ones, after all. This discussion has been edited for length and clarity.