The Europe of the Intellectuals: Europe's Key Problems in the Eyes of its Cultural Elite
Europe has, much more than the US, a tradition of the public role of the intellectual. Prominent thinkers and writers of all persuasions and origins—from Bertrand Russell to Jürgen Habermas, from Voltaire to Vaclav Havel, from Simone de Beauvoir to Christa Wolf, and from Thomas Mann to Günter Grass—have amply and often eloquently commented upon the course of history and on what they see as the forces behind it. To the reflections of Europe's artists, novelists, philosophers, and cultural critics, we owe sometimes profound, often surprising, and always interesting insights into “the heart of the matter” (Graham Greene).
As Europe is facing serious and, in many ways, unprecedented challenges—the tensions between secularization and religious fundamentalism, the quandary of intergenerational justice in its welfare policies, profound uncertainties regarding its role in the world, and even the very question of what Europe really is (and where it ends)—it should be revealing to see how Europe's intellectual elites interpret these problems and reflect on their solutions.
Three seasoned and critical (and, in their own right, eloquent) Stanford observers of cultural life in Europe will discuss some of these issues and how they are reflected in the contemporary Europe an intellectual discourse.
Russel A. Berman
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities and Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Albert Guerard Professor of Literature and Professor of French and Italian
Hans N. Weiler
Professor Emeritus of Education and Political Science