The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch

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Название The Summer of Theory
Автор произведения Philipp Felsch
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509539871



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Frankfurt Book Fair, was the Theorie series, whose minimalistic cover was the sober counterpoint to the candy-coloured, pop-art design of its older sister: the Suhrkamp culture’s White Album, so to speak, to follow its Sergeant Pepper.46 Of course, the Theorie series never became as successful as the edition suhrkamp. Not until the 1970s did its successor series reach a wider readership, the midnight-blue suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft (that is, ‘Suhrkamp academic paperback’, or stw for short).47 The Theorie series can be credited with a different achievement, however: its title helped to establish a new genre.

      Referring to himself in a letter to Unseld as a ‘hunting dog’ for Suhrkamp, Taubes threw himself with zeal into the task of defining the intellectual profile of the new series.59 ‘He’s always thinking of new things, among which there are no doubt many important, even necessary works’, Karl Markus Michel noted in 1965 after a meeting in Berlin. But he added that Taubes’s proposals not only needed supervision – ‘they are almost eager for supervision’.60 ‘Theory’ in 1965 mainly meant critical social theory along the lines of the New Left, and the idea of Taubes’s that met with the greatest approval from Michel was Karel Kosík’s Dialectics of the Concrete, the manifesto of a humanistic materialism from the thaw of Czechoslovakia. But Unseld had intentionally put together a group of series editors with internal checks and balances. Dieter Henrich was worried that Suhrkamp might use the series that he co-edited as an ‘ideological forum’.61 ‘All of that is indispensable’, he wrote to Unseld, who had set out for him what he understood by Enlightenment, ‘but is it everything? Enlightenment didn’t always come from “the left”. And when it did, often enough it was the adversary who had provoked the best arguments, or even supplied them.’62