THE LONG SUMMER OF THEORY. HISTORY OF A REVOLT 1960-1990

Philipp Felsch
Junior Professor of History of the Humanities at the Free University of Berlin

Theory - the word has had a magical glow since the sixties. Theory was an article of faith, a truth machine and a way of life. But where did the fascination with „dangerous“ ideas come from? In a world frozen in the Cold War, only big ideas could generate movement. The more difficult the texts, the more intense the reading, the more abstract the arguments, the more relevant to reality. Today, when the intellectual energies of ’68 have disintegrated into faintly smouldering substances and many of the former protagonists have written their memoirs, it is time to look back: What was theory? In his book, Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and aberrations of a generation that ventured into the jungle of difficult texts and writes the story of an intellectual revolt by following the adventures of the book makers and their environment. Above all, however, he entrusts himself to the history of their readers in order to resurrect an era in which thinking still helped.

Moderation
Isolde Charim, author and philosopher