Recent Publications by Professor James Schmidt
Professor James Schmidt’s article, “Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ — Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault,” has just appeared in History of European Ideas.
Also in early January, Prof. Schmidt presented a paper entitled “Constructing a Counter-Enlightenment: Liberalism, Nihilism, and Totalitarianism” at the meetings of the American Historical Association in Boston. It draws on his recent research in the Lionel Trilling papers at Columbia and explores Trilling’s role in the origins of the notion of “counter-enlightenment” in the late 1940s. The paper argues that the concept has less to do with an effort to make sense of the eighteenth century than with discussions of the prospects for liberalism in the early years of the Cold War.
Copies of the first two items are available for download here.