pinched by the demands of the mass market: Schiller and Goethe adroitly
played both bases. For the same reason, the moment of extreme artistic self-
glorification was transitory. Within the next generations, intellectuals in the
writers’ market would take on an alienated tone whenever they attempted to
work to higher and more esoteric standards than their audience would buy.
In Germany the intellectual world became academicized before anywhere
else, and this made the fate of aesthetic Idealism different than in England and
the United States. In the latter places it was a relatively ephemeral movement
of literary Romanticism, later submerged beneath the outbursts of full-fledged
technical Idealist philosophy when those university systems were finally secu-
larized. In Germany the professional scholars in their autonomous university
base had already seized control of the intellectual attention space; aesthetic
Idealism became a rear-guard action, carried by anti-modernist protesters who
were also outsiders relying on a popular writers’ market against the dominance
of the university. That is why so many of the thematic clashes of modernist
sensibility first occurred in the German orbit.
The network lineage of the aesthetic Idealists consists of the predecessors
of what later became existentialism, the modern movement of literary-aca-
demic hybrids par excellence. This was the highbrow end of the writers’
market. There were other philosophical hybrids. In countries where the uni-
versity revolution was delayed, philosophy continued to be produced by gen-
eral-purpose intellectuals who made a living on the popular writing market.
One such result was to give philosophy a slant toward political activism,
comprising forms such as Utilitarianism or even, as in Russia, revolutionary
radicalism. An even larger market niche, during the era of de-clericalization
and disestablishment of the state religions, was for writings at the interface
between religion and science. Religious tracts had always been the biggest seller
since the inception of print media. Now countries with the appropriate brand
of religious politics went through a period in which the popular best-selling
philosophies were forms of vitalism.
After the academic revolution was completed and universities had ex-
panded, the careers of virtually all intellectuals gravitated to some degree into
academic channels. Philosophies oriented toward popular writing markets now
came into conflict with those oriented toward academic specialists. In most
places the academics unequivocally won. But in a few instances the two
structures of intellectual production have held on in tandem, without one
eclipsing the other. The result has been a distinctive mix of academic techni-
calities with ideologies resonating with the situation of intellectuals on the
writers’ market. The classic case is France, where the literary-academic hybrid
underlies philosophical movements down through existentialism and postmod-
ernism.756 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths