Michael S. Roth

In this provocative contribution to the disputes surrounding a liberal education, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America's long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education.

Why Liberal Education Matters

Beyond the University

Knowing and History charts the development of Hegelian philosophy of history in France from the 1930s through the postwar period, and critically assesses its significance for an understanding of our cultural present and of the possibilities for making meaning out of change over time. Michael Roth provides detailed analyses of the works of three of the most important Hegelian thinkers: Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojève, and Eric Weil. These philosophers turned to history as the source of truths and criteria of judgment: they forged connections between history and knowing as a means of confronting key modem philosophical problems, and of engaging their contemporary political concerns. By the 1950s, however, they had withdrawn from the historical in search of a more secure, hopeful subject for reflection. According to Roth, the French Hegelians' work illuminates the power and limitations of the philosophical approach to history. Further, he finds in the development of their philosophies one of the crucial transformations in modem intellectual history: the shift from a concern with questions of significance to a concern with questions of use or function. He seeks to explicate the contemporary retreat from questions of significance by situating our cultural moment in relation to its intellectual antecedents. In an Afterword devoted to French post-structuralism, the author discusses Hegel's replacement by Nietzsche as the locus of philosophical authority in France in the 1960s, and examines how this shift informs the work of Michel Foucault. Roth argues that the use of Nietzsche against a dialectical philosophy of history contributes to a serious disjunction between philosophical reflection and political judgment. Relevant to a wide variety of disciplines, Knowing and History will appeal to those specializing in intellectual history and political theory, as well as philosophers of history, critical theorists, and students of modem French thought and culture.

Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France

Knowing and History

This wide-ranging collection of essays on the cultural history of modern Europe is unified by a concern with how the relation between self and society finds expression in cultural production. The distinguished contributors trace the interaction of socio-political conditions with ideas of self and society, describe the ways in which culture makers respond to political and religious issues by creating new forms of art, explore notions of the self created in historical crises, and reveal how certain constructions of history and time are related to narrative structure and performance.

Culture, Politics, and the Psyche

Rediscovering History

In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing memory disorders, which signal fundamental changes in the understanding of present and past. He next explores links between historical consciousness and issues relating to the psyche, including trauma and repression and hypnosis and therapy. Roth turns to the work of postmodern theorists in connection with the philosophy of history and then examines photography's capacity to capture traces of the past. He considers how we strive to be faithful to the past even when we don't care about getting it right or using it productively. Roth concludes with essays defending pragmatic and reflexive liberal education. Drawing on his experiences as a teacher and academic leader, he speaks of living with the past without being dominated by it.

Essays on Living with the Past

Memory, Trauma, and History

A companion volume to the Library of Congress exhibition features a collection of provocative essays--by Oliver Sacks, Peter Gay, Robert Coles, Art Spiegelman, and other notable scholars, critics, and writers--on Freud, his theories, and his impact on modern psychoanalysis. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Conflict and Culture

Freud

Charles G. Salas

Head of Research and Education Charles G Salas

Getty research institute (Los Angeles, Calif.).

In Disturbing Remains, ten extraordinary scholars focus on the remembrance and representation of traumatic historical events in the twentieth century. The volume opens with essays by David William Cohen, Veena Das, and Philip Gourevitch. Their reflections on the narratives framing Robert Ouko's death in Kenya, Sikh-Hindu violence in India around the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, and the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda offer fresh insights into the genesis and aftermath of these tragedies. The next four essays explore the expression of societal disaster in works of art and ritual. Lenin's image, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, balsa figurines of whites made by the Kuna of Panama, and Chinese fertility statuettes after Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward are the subjects taken up by Leah Dickerman, Carlo Ginzburg, Carlo Severi, and Jun Jing. Disturbing Remains closes with three essays about the influence of the dead on the construction of shared identity. Istvï¿½n Rï¿½v looks at how Hungarians have dealt with the 1956 revolution and its executed leader, and Jï¿½rn Rï¿½sen and Saul Friedlï¿½nder contemplate the public memory of the Holocaust in Germany and worldwide.

Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century

Disturbing Remains

In this book Michael S. Roth argues that psycho-analysis, as Freud conceived it, is first and foremost a theory of history which aims at freedom through a self-consciousness of the presentness of the past.

Negation and Freedom in Freud

Psycho-Analysis as History

"Memory, trauma, and history is comprosed of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and liberal education." -- Introduction.

From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal—from both liberals and conservatives—of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.

Michael S. Roth

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