Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, 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.
Late eighteenth-century Germans, troubled by a massive increase in the publication and availability of printed material, felt threatened by a veritable "plague" of books that circulated "contagiously" among the reading public. But deep concerns about what counted as authoritative knowledge, not to mention the fear of information overload, also made them uneasy, as they watched universities come under increasing pressure to offer more practical training and to justify their existence in the age of print.
German intellectuals were the first to settle on the research university, and its organizing system of intellectual specialization, as the solution to these related problems. 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.
