BA History and German

In an influential 1982 study, the critic Marshal Berman cites a formulation from the communist manifesto, whereby ‘to be modern is to be part of a universe in which … “all that is solid melts into air”’. According to Berman, the experience of modernity thus involves at least two steps: first, the dissolution of traditional certainties regarding everything from our sense of self to the organisation of our societies; and second, the countless, often contradictory efforts to regain a sense of orientation in this context. Perhaps not coincidentally, some thinkers who have significantly contributed to unsettling such time-honoured beliefs, while also inaugurating new ways of understanding the modern world, hail from the German-speaking lands: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Hannah Arendt, among others. By introducing these author’s writings on political and libidinal economy---on art, culture, and identity---this unit asks: what might their accounts of ‘Sex’, ‘Money’, and ‘Power’ mean to us today? 

 The unit aims:

• To develop knowledge and understanding of the concept of modernity and key expressions thereof in the fields of political and libidinal economy, as well as art and culture.
• To develop key competencies in the critical analysis of key texts in modern intellectual history
• To develop critical thinking and higher order conceptual reasoning and analytical skills
• To develop advanced skills of written and verbal communication 

Resit Assessment: Essay

• Berman, Marshal, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1982)  
• Marx, Karl, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978)
• Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Paul Reitter, eds. Paul North & Paul Reitter (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2024)
• Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974)
• Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1995)
• Freud, Sigmund, The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Philips (London: Penguin, 2006)
• Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2006)
• Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1922)