Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Germany’s rising star was also signaled by the popularity of Germaine de Staël’s Germany (1813), a book that had a major impact on French, English, and American intellectual life. In the United States, Madame de Staël’s book inspired many budding intellectuals to take up the study of German language and literature. It was read by the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, later to become America’s leading man of letters. In conjunction with her book’s popularity, the 1810s and 1820s also began a trend of young intellectuals going to Germany to study. This group included many of those later prominent in American intellectual life. Edward Everett was one of Emerson’s professors at Harvard. Ralph’s brother William studied the new Schleiermacher- and Hegel-inspired approaches to theology and biblical criticism at Heidelberg. George Ticknor later became professor of belles-lettres at Harvard. And George Bancroft, “the father of American history,” attended several German universities, including hearing Hegel’s lectures in Berlin.