Anson G. Rabinbach | |
---|---|
Born | [1] | June 2, 1945
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | scholar, historian |
Title | Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University [1] |
Board member of | Co-editor, New German Critique |
Academic background | |
Education | Ph.D. |
Alma mater | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Historian |
Sub-discipline | European Intellectual History |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Main interests | Germany,Austria,Fascism,Intellectual History,Critical Theory |
Notable works | The Human Motor:Energy,Fatigue,and the Origins of Modernity (1990) [2] |
Anson Gilbert Rabinbach (born June 2,1945) is a historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History,Emeritus at Princeton University. [3] [4] He is best known for his writings on labor,Nazi Germany,Austria,and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique ,which he continues to co-edit. [5] [6]
Rabinbach was born in the West Bronx,New York City. His father was a Polish-Jewish communist revolutionary. [7] Rabinbach received his B.A. from Hofstra University in 1967. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1973. His dissertation,supervised by George Mosse,was published in 1983 as The Crisis of Austrian Socialism:From Red Vienna to Civil War,1927–1934. [8]
Rabinbach taught at Hampshire College in Amherst,Massachusetts and at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City,where he was Professor of History and twice served as Acting Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. From 1996 to 2019 he taught at Princeton University,where he is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus. [3]
In 2012 a special issue of New German Critique was dedicated to Rabinbach's work and legacy. In their introduction to the issue,David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen note Rabinbach's "compelling... staging of texts and debates written by or involving public intellectuals that have arisen in moments of crisis,catastrophe,or apocalypse," including his seminal writings on Theodor W. Adorno,Hannah Arendt,Walter Benjamin,Ernst Bloch,Martin Heidegger,Max Horkheimer,Karl Jaspers,and Raphael Lemkin. [9] In his 1997 book In the Shadow of Catastrophe:German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment,Rabinbach characterizes these authors' writings on Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century as "powerful philosophical attempts to translate that experience into a philosophical language whose legacy still exerts a powerful intellectual and sometimes even political influence today." [10] For his notable 1976 article "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich," Rabinbach interviewed the notorious former Nazi architect and armaments minister Albert Speer. [11]
The historian Martin Jay has called Rabinbach's 1990 book The Human Motor:Energy,Fatigue,and the Origins of Modernity "a classic of cultural studies" that "revealed for the first time the importance of the late-19th-century European obsession with the laboring body and its vicissitudes." [12] The German historian Norbert Frei has written that Rabinbach is "widely known beyond the confines of his field" for this work,which has been also translated into German (2001) and French (2005). [13]
In 1987,for his research on Red Vienna,Rabinbach was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize of the Republic of Austria (Victor-Adler-Staatspreis für Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen ), [14] the highest honor for the humanities in Austria. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, [15] the National Endowment for the Humanities, [16] the Fulbright Program (as a visiting professor at Smolny College in St. Petersburg,Russia), [17] and the American Academy in Berlin. [18]
At Princeton,Rabinbach taught courses on twentieth-century Europe,European intellectual and cultural history,and European Fascism. From 1996 to 2008 he was director of Princeton University’s Program in European Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Jena,the University of Bremen,Smolny College of Saint Petersburg State University,and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. [1]
Rabinbach has been described as a "New York intellectual." [9] His popular writings and reviews have appeared in Dissent , [19] The Nation , [20] Times Literary Supplement , [21] and The New York Times . [22]
He was previously married to the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin,with whom he has two children. [23] He lives in New York City. [1]
Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism. Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Waldemar Gurian, Carlo Galli, Jaime Guzmán, Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Hayek, Reinhart Koselleck, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.
The National Socialist Program, also known as the 25-point Program or the 25-point Plan, was the party program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Adolf Hitler announced the party's program on 24 February 1920 before approximately 2,000 people in the Munich Festival of the Hofbräuhaus and within the program was written "The leaders of the Party swear to go straight forward, if necessary to sacrifice their lives in securing fulfilment of the foregoing points" and declared the program unalterable. The National Socialist Program originated at a DAP congress in Vienna, then was taken to Munich, by the civil engineer and theorist Rudolf Jung, who having explicitly supported Hitler had been expelled from Czechoslovakia because of his political agitation.
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
The unification of Germany was the process of building the modern German nation-state with federal features based on the concept of Lesser Germany, which commenced on 18 August 1866 with adoption of the North German Confederation Treaty establishing the North German Confederation, initially a Prussian-dominated military alliance which was subsequently deepened through adoption of the North German Constitution. The process symbolically concluded with the ceremonial proclamation of the German Empire i.e. the German Reich having 25 member states and led by the Kingdom of Prussia of the Hohenzollerns on 18 January 1871; the event was later celebrated as the customary date of the German Empire's foundation, although the legally meaningful events relevant to the accomplishment of unification occurred on 1 January 1871 and 4 May 1871.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist propaganda group founded on June 26, 1950 in West Berlin, and was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies. At its height, the CCF was active in thirty-five countries. In 1966 it was revealed that the CIA was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the group. The congress aimed to enlist intellectuals and opinion makers in a war of ideas against communism.
Gordon Alexander Craig was a Scottish-American liberal historian of German history and of diplomatic history.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, and for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prizewinning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Saul Friedländer is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.
Roman Osipovich Rosdolsky was a prominent Ukrainian Marxian scholar, historian and political theorist. Rodolsky's book The Making of Marx's Capital, became a foundational text in the rediscovery of Marx critique of political economy. As well as influenced later scholars such as Moishe Postone.
Claudia Ann Koonz is an American historian of Nazi Germany. Koonz's critique of the role of women during the Nazi era, from a feminist perspective, has become a subject of much debate and research in itself. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award, and a National Book Award finalist. Koonz has appeared on the podcasts Holocaust, hosted by University of California Television, and Real Dictators, hosted by Paul McGann. In the months before the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz wrote about the risks of autocracy in the United States for History News Network and the New School's Public Seminar.
Jeffrey C. Herf is an American historian of Modern European, in particular, modern German history. He is Distinguished University Professor of modern European at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Volker Rolf Berghahn is a historian of German and modern European history at Columbia University. His research interests have included the fin de siècle period in Europe, the origins of World War I, and German-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1961 and his PhD, under supervision of Francis L. Carsten, from the University of London in 1964. Prior to teaching in the United States, Berghahn worked in the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1988, he accepted a position at Brown University, and moved to Columbia ten years later.
The New German Critique is a contemporary academic journal in German studies. It is associated with the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. It "covers twentieth century political and social theory, philosophy, literature, film, media and art, reading cultural texts in the light of current theoretical debates." The executive editors are David Bathrick (Cornell), Andreas Huyssen (Columbia), and Anson Rabinbach (Princeton).
Myles W. Jackson is currently the inaugural Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and lecturer with the rank of professor of history at Princeton University. He was the inaugural Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science at New York University-Gallatin, Professor of History of the Faculty of Arts and Science of New York University, Professor of the Division of Medical Bioethics of NYU-Langone School of Medicine, Faculty Affiliate of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, NYU School of Law, and Director of Science and Society of the College of Arts and Science at NYU. He was also the inaugural Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2007 to 2012. The chair is named after Bern Dibner, an electrical engineer, industrialist, historian of science and technology and alumnus of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
Red fascism is a term equating Stalinism, Maoism, and other variants of Marxism–Leninism with fascism. Accusations that the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era acted as "red fascists" were commonly stated by anarchists, left communists, social democrats and other democratic socialists as well as liberals and among right-wing circles.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis, theology and religion, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory, and she has edited anthologies on sexuality in the Third Reich, sexuality in twentieth-century Austria, and the Holocaust.
Jean-Maurice Lahy was a French psychologist, physiologist and sociologist, and an important contributor to the European Science of Work in the early 20th century. He spearheaded a thorough critique and revision of F.W Taylor's system of scientific management, upon its introduction into French factories.
Joachim Ritter was a German philosopher and founder of the so-called Ritter School of liberal conservatism.
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
Norbert Frei is a German historian. He holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and leads the Jena Center of 20th Century History. Frei's research work investigates how German society came to terms with Nazism and the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II.