Organizing Enlightenment

A timely and provocative book written with contemporary debates in mind, Organizing Enlightenment gives us an impressive history not of academic disciplines but of disciplinarity itself—the infrastructure of specialization that has come to characterize the modern research university. What is the point of specialization? What is the role of the book within learning? Are lectures outmoded or sources of enlivened knowledge? Organizing Enlightenment helps us understand how specialization is not a new problem to be solved but the answer to an older problem of media surplus which we still inhabit. The more we hear calls for the reform of research universities today, the more we will need such insightful and clearly written histories as this one.

The crisis of the university in the age of MOOCs and the new media? As Chad Wellmon shows in this learned and lucid study, we've been there before, several times. Tracing the development of the university from the shock of the print revolution in the seventeenth century, to the rise of the utilitarian knowledge factory in eighteenth-century Göttingen and Halle, and to the emergence of the research university in nineteenth-century Berlin, Wellmon gives us a thought-provoking account of an astonishingly resilient institution. He also offers rich material for reflection on the meaning of the life of the mind, whether pursued in the classroom, the library, the laboratory—or online.