Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University

Wellmon, Chad

ISBN 10: 1421416158 / ISBN 13: 9781421416151

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

About this Item

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G1421416158I4N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1421416158
• ISBN 13: 9781421416151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 1.55 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

The Enlightenment-era concerns that gave rise to the modern research university can illuminate contemporary debates about knowledge in the digital age.

Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge.

Drawing on the histories of science, the university, and print, as well as media theory and philosophy, Chad Wellmon explains how the research university and the ethic of disciplinarity it created emerged as the final and most lasting technology of the Enlightenment. Organizing Enlightenment reveals higher education’s story as one not only of the production of knowledge but also of the formation of a particular type of person: the disciplinary self. In order to survive, the university would have to institutionalize a new order of knowledge, one that was self-organizing, internally coherent, and embodied in the very character of the modern, critical scholar.

About the Author

Chad Wellmon is an associate professor of German studies at the University of Virginia and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom.