Abstract
The book argues that, to navigate the current crisis of liberal democracies, we need a robust new interdisciplinary framework. The groundbreaking model established by the Frankfurt School thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s offers a productive starting point. However, as Morgan argues, it needs to be updated and radically revised to suit the challenges of today. The resulting model draws on the Frankfurt School thinkers but also on a range of contemporaries with whom the Frankfurt School thinkers only inadequately engaged such as Friedrich Hayek, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. Furthermore, it makes use of current work in political economy and the cognitive sciences that was not yet available to the mid-twentieth-century thinkers.
The new approach demonstrates the key role played by everyday virtues of tolerance and intellectual modesty in a pluralistic and incremental search for improved forms of living, while insisting on rigorous, evidence-based, and formally tested interdisciplinarity. This approach suggests that political, economic and scientific decisions are embedded in a wider culture that can, and must, be analysed and better understood. Such understanding begins with full acknowledgement of the various means by which cultural transmission occurs, via channels that operate over and beyond analytic understanding, in families, schools, universities, places of worship, day-to-day interactions, and forms of voluntary association. These shared, overlapping if heterogeneous practices underpin the ability of human societies to constructively agree and disagree, a foundational premise of liberal democracies. Thus, to allow for productive debate that is genuinely pluralistic and at the same time coherent enough to both assess and impact our world, we must develop, hone, and promote forms of cogent evaluative interchange: an interdisciplinarity worthy of the 21st century.
Bio
Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020/21 he was Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2013), and numerous articles on modernist literature, film, and philosophy. He has edited, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins Anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky a Special Issue of Poetics Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).