Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas
by: Gossman, Lionel

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 608 pages. This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Focusing on the four professors from Basel, Switzerland, Gossman explains their work and how their environment influenced that work. Basel is a small city state of wealthy merchants who look at the dawn of "modern" Europe with non-disguised horror and disgust. The critique is both with Prussian style nationalism and with incipient "mass culture," here represented mostly by "the press" and newspapers. These thinkers provided a conservative critique that has proved profoundly influential to thinkers on both the left and right. Clean copy.