Book Launch: Austin Harrington - German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar

We are pleased to invite four leading social theorists to pose comments and questions about the work to the author.

Special Book Launch Event

Austin Harrington 'German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar'

with:

Gerard Delanty, University of Sussex, & Editor European Journal of Social Theory

William Outhwaite, University of Newcastle

Monica Sassatelli, Goldsmiths' College, London

Bobby Sayyid, University of Leeds

There has been considerable interest in recent years in German social thinkers of the Weimar era. Generally, this has focused on reactionary and nationalist figures such as Schmitt and Heidegger. In this book, Austin Harrington offers a broader account of the German intellectual legacy of the period. He explores the ideas of a circle of left-liberal cosmopolitan thinkers (Troeltsch, Scheler, Tönnies, Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Mannheim, Jaspers, Curtius, and Simmel) who responded to Germany's crisis by rejecting the popular appeal of nationalism. Instead, they promoted pan-European reconciliation based on notions of a shared European heritage between East and West. Leeds’ sociologist Austin Harrington examines their concepts of nationhood, religion, and 'civilization' in the context of their time and in their bearing on subsequent debates about European identity and the place of the modern West in global social change. The result is a groundbreaking contribution to current questions in social, cultural and historical theory.

To celebrate the publication of this major work with Cambridge University Press (2016), and interrogate its insights in the light of our own difficult contemporary moment, we are pleased to invite four leading social theorists to pose comments and questions about the work to the author. All Welcome.

Co-sponsored by the Bauman Institute, the School of Sociology and Social Policy, and the Seminar on Political Demography. For more information contact Thomas Campbell or Adrian Favell.