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Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas

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Over the years many books have been written on the culture of fin-de-siecle Vienna, but no one had attempted a similar study of Basel, Switzerland, a city that blossomed as a cultural center during the Renaissance and then slowly faded over the centuries, as peace and prosperity teamed together to eliminate the tensions that make a city into a center of arts and literature. Vienna was done in by the war, Basel by peace.

Lionel Gossman has written an interesting and lively study of the city, choosing to focus on the four major thinkers that mark its last great period in intellectual history: Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Jacob Bachofen, Frans Overbeck, and Friedrich Nietzsche. and how their ideas were ultimately interwoven with the culture and tradition of Basel itself.

Recommended for anyone interested in the history of ideas and the question of not only whether liberty can co-exist with democracy, but can a culture keep alive in a setting that has escaped the tensions of its day, such as revolution, depression and war?

Lionel Gossman seems to be a student of human nature as well as a professional historian, and he is at his best when examining his main characters: the rather delirious Johann Jacob Bachofen (treated here at length); Friedrich Nietzsche (discussed much more briefly but to great effect); and the central figure of Jacob Burckhardt. For more than two decades, Gossman has been wrestling with the confrontation of these men and modernity in the historical theater of 19th-century Basel. This magnificent book is the result. Gossman writes about his characters with a certain wryness that may be born of familiarity, but his enthusiasm for them (particularly Burckhardt) has not been worn down by time or erudition. His style of intellectual history reminded me of that of Joseph Levenson in his trilogy on Confucian China: large-souled yet agile and ready to be delighted.

Burckhardt was a rebel, in his way; thus, in great part, the "Unseasonable Ideas" of the subtitle. As the previous reviewer noted, the issues being dealt with here are very serious ones for us today as they were in Burckhardt's time. There is a rebellious quality to Gossman's own thinking, when he invites us to re-examine some of our received ideas about democracy, culture, education and the well-lived life.

This book is a great example of what is meant by "intellectual history." 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. As you read Burckhardt denouncing the popular press, you can't help but think of William Bennett and the Frankfurt School simultaneously. How's that for influence and prescience?

Gossman also does excellent work summarizing the positions of opposing scholars. Pretty much everything about this book is well executed, and it's even more amazing because Gossman is a professor of Romance Languages at Princeton. This subject matter isn't exactly in his specialty. But, the Burckhardt would no doubt approve. Recommend!