German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back

by Louis Dumont

In this comparative anthropological analysis, Louis Dumont illuminates German and French ideology, European culture, and cultural interaction. His analysis of texts by Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe, and others, against the background of previously gathered evidence and of French common notions, specify the differences—otherwise frequently but vaguely alluded to—between French and German cultures.

Anyone interested in the fate of national ideology and the concept of the individual will benefit from this radical reinterpretation of modern values and the place of modernity in history.

"What François Furet did for French history, Dumont did for anthropology, turning it away from engaged politics and towards the sober study of the modern age." —Mark Lilla, London Review of Books

"There are many fine things in Dumont's study. Beyond any doubt, his cultural anthropology of the modern spirit highlights some of the key energies of the of the last two centuries. . . . [An] impressive . . . detailed analysis." —Martin Swales, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[An] unsettling, rich, demanding, profound study." — Publishers Weekly

Genres: Philosophy, Anthropology

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 1995

About the author

French anthropologist. He was an associate professor at Oxford University during the 1950s, and director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

Reviews

[versarbre]

Philosophical treatises of the idea of German particularism in adapting to the "modern ideology" of individualism, and its problem of German modern politics. (Perhaps it can be read together with the Jewish Question by Karl Marx.) The book begins with the contrast between a French standing on the relation between individual and her particular cultural community and a German standing on the same issue that Dumont has already discussed on his individualism book. “The one proclaims, ‘I am a man by nature, and a Frenchman by accident,’ the other confesses: ‘I am essentially a German, and I am a man through my being a German” (Dumont, 1986, p131). This is the key to the rest of the book.