CHAPTER 12
£Intellectuals Take Control of Their Base:
The German University Revolution
The period from 1765 to the present is institutionally all of a piece. The
continuity may not be apparent at first glance; Kant and the German Idealists
seem epochs away from the themes of our own century. But Idealism was the
intellectual counterpart of the academic revolution, the creation of the modern
university centered on the graduate faculty of research professors, and that
material base has expanded to dominate intellectual life ever since. Kant
straddled two worlds: the patronage networks of the previous period, and the
modern research university, which came into being, in part through Kant’s own
agitation, with the generation of Kant’s successors. The time of the Romantics
and Idealists was a transition to our contemporary situation. University-based
intellectual networks had existed before, but never with such autonomy for
researchers to define their own paths and such power to take over every sphere
of intellectual life. The philosophical issues of the last 200 years have been
those generated by the expansionary dynamic of that system.
There have been two large consequences of the academic revolution, one
internal to philosophy, the other structural.
The contents of modern philosophy have been built up in a sequence of
struggles. The battle first fought in Germany recurred as the old religious
schools were reformed in one country after another along the lines founded at
the University of Berlin in 1810. Variants of Idealism appeared several genera-
tions later in Britain, the United States, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere, when the
German academic model was imported. Idealism was the battle doctrine of the
first generations of secularizers, a halfway house for wresting theology into
secular hands; as the tide turned, Idealism became adopted as a defensive
doctrine by religious thinkers. In each case, the new generation went beyond
the halfway house of their predecessors into rebellious movements such as
materialism, positivism, and analytical and semantic philosophies. There oc-
curred the usual splits to fill the new attention space under the intellectual law
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