In this Book

  • Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University
  • Book
  • Chad Wellmon
  • 2015
  • Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
    • Viewed
    • View Citation
buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary
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.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title page, Copyright, Dedication
  2. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contents
  2. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-xii
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Introduction
  2. pp. 1-19
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 1. Science as Culture
  2. pp. 20-44
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 2. The Fractured Empire of Erudition
  2. pp. 45-76
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 3. Encyclopedia from Book to Practice
  2. pp. 77-107
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 4. From Bibliography to Ethics
  2. pp. 108-122
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 5. Kant’s Critical Technology
  2. pp. 123-150
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 6. The Enlightenment University and Too Many Books
  2. pp. 151-181
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 7. The University in the Age of Print
  2. pp. 182-209
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 8. Berlin, Humboldt, and the Research University
  2. pp. 210-233
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 9. The Disciplinary Self and the Virtues of the Philologist
  2. pp. 234-261
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Afterword: Too Many Links
  2. pp. 262-276
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 277-316
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 317-340
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 341-353
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top