The Twilight of the Ivory Tower: Democracy and Aristocracy of the Spirit

Abstract

On November 7, 1917, in Munich, Weber delivered his famous seminar, Wissenschaft als Beruf, analysing the conditions that characterized the teaching profession in the German university of the time. Without concealing the evident cracks in the Humboldtian model and fully aware of the tumultuous transformation of European higher education, Weber was able to focus on the decisive tension between the survival of forcibly elitist ideals and the irruption of the masses into European history

The article intends to start from the fibrillation that ran through the ideas of the university in the early twentieth century, to question the current crisis of the role of culture and the status of the word of experts, in a contemporaneity in which the decline of grand narratives and the prevalence of quantitative criterion seem to demand answers that know how to go beyond both the aspirations of von Humboldt and the projects of Newman.