Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History.

309 Pages·2021·16.442 MB·English

by  Martin Jay

Genesis and Validity
Also by Martin Jay
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (1973 and 1996)
Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas (1984)
Adorno (1984)
Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from
Germany to Amer i ca (1985)
Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (1988)
Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993)
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century
French Thought (1993)
Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (1998)
Refractions of Vio lence (2003)
La Crisis de la experiencia en la era postsubjetiva, ed.
Eduardo Sabrovsky (2003)
Songs of Experience: Modern American and Eu ro pean Variations on a
Universal Theme (2005)
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010)
Essays from Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (2011)
Kracauer l’exilé (2014)
Reason A fter Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016)
Splinters in your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020)
Genesis and Validity
The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History
Martin Jay
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jay, Martin, author.
Title: Genesis and validity : the theory and practice of intellectual
history / Martin Jay.
Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.
Description: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] |
Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003508 | ISBN 9780812253405 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Intellectual life—History. | History—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC D16.9 .J35 2021 | DDC 901—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003508
For my students at Berkeley
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE
Series Editors
Angus Burgin
Peter E. Gordon
Joel Isaac
Karuna Mantena
Samuel Moyn
Jennifer Ratner- Rosenhagen
Camille Robcis
Sophia Rosenfeld
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Impudent Claims and Loathsome Questions:
Intellectual History as Judgment of the Past 28
Chapter 2. Historical Explanation and the Event:
Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization 34
Chapter 3. Intention and Irony: The Missed Encounter
Between Hayden White and Quentin Skinner 48
Chapter 4. Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin:
Modes of Jewish Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century 62
Chapter 5. Against Rigor: Hans Blumenberg on Freud and Arendt 78
Chapter 6. “Hey! What’s the Big Idea?”: Ruminations on the
Question of Scale in Intellectual History 93
Chapter 7. Fidelity to the Event? Lukács’s History and
Class Consciousness and the Rus sian Revolution 106
Chapter 8. Can Photo graphs Lie? Reflections on a
Perennial Anxiety 124
Chapter 9. Sublime Historical Experience, Real Presence,
and Photography 140
viii Contents
Chapter 10. The Heroism of Modern Life and the Sociology of
Modernization: Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel 155
Chapter 11. Historical Truth and the Truthfulness of Historians 174
Chapter 12. Theory and Philosophy: Antonyms in
Our Semantic Field? 193
Chapter 13. The Weaponization of Free Speech 204
Notes 219
Index 283
Acknowl edgments 297
Introduction
There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of Western
thought— and perhaps not it alone— than the vexed relationship between the
genesis of an idea or value in a specific context, and its claim to validity be-
yond it.1 Can ideas or values transcend their spatial and temporal origins,
earning abiding re spect for their intrinsic merit, or do they necessarily re-
flect them in ways that belie their universal pretensions? Are discrete con-
texts, however they are defined, so incommensurable and unique that the
intact passage of ideas from one to the other is inevitably impeded? Can ideas
survive their voyages away from home in ways that enable meaningful trans-
cultural comparison? Are historical epochs so radically dif ere nt that no
standards of pro gress or development (or regression and decay) can grant the
pre sent the right to weigh the merits of past ideas or values by criteria that
transcend the moment of their promulgation? Are we inevitably compelled
to judge based on the standards of our own cultural standpoint, contrary to
the familiar French proverb Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner. In short,
to borrow the elegant meta phor of the American intellectual historian John
Diggins, is it pos si ble to extract the oyster entirely from the pearl that ex-
creted it?2
These questions have, in fact, been around for a very long time. At least
since the invention of writing, the possibility of surviving the place and mo-
ment of enunciation has enabled the claim of what is enunciated to transcend
its origins. But as soon as isolated cultural systems, unreflectively secure in
their assumptions, were challenged from without by contact with compet-
ing systems or undermined from within by heterodox doubts, absolute claims
of truth or unbending standards of moral virtue were haunted by the spec-
ter of contextual relativity. Although anticipated in even the most apparently
self- assured of premodern cultures— the Hebrew Bible, for example, rec ords
an often awkward and contentious if nonetheless inspiring strug gle to ground
universal claims in the contingent narrative of a par tic u lar p eople3— such