Thread by @SperglerAcolyte

People forget the extent to which Germany was the intellectual capital of the Western world prior to the mid 20th-century. Before Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, there were Humboldt, Göttingen, and Heidelberg. Germany dominated the sciences and humanities.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859) was a German naturalist who merged Romantic philosophy with science. His main work, Cosmos, attempted to document and comprehend the natural world. Charles Darwin called Humboldt "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived."

This is Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886). If you're from the Anglophone world, there's a good chance you've never heard of him. He is the father of modern empirical and source-based studies of history. The notion of seeking objectivity in history begins with him.

In 1902, Theodor Mommsen (1817 - 1903) was awarded the Nobel Prize for his historical research of ancient Rome. Over the course of his life, he published over 1500 works and revolutionized the study of Roman history.

Eduard Meyer (1855 - 1930) wrote an eight volume work on the history of antiquity. The sheer quantity of what these men produced is unfathomable when compared to modern academics. Who today comes even close to the intellectual vision and the prolific output of these men?

"But... quality over quantity, right?" Give me a break. Their level of intellectual discourse puts today's to shame. This is Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 - 1911) a Historicist known for his work on scientific methodology. Emphasized the Bildung [cultivation] of the historian.

Dilthey and the Historicists hotly debated neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband (1848 - 1915) over the proper conduct of historical research. Both sides employed argued over the works of Kant to determine the epistemological boundaries for the discipline.

Can you imagine modern academics having such a debate in their fields? No academic reads Kant today (never mind incorporating his epistemology into their theories of historical research!). The decline in intellectual capacity is readily apparent. Avg. IQ probably dropped 15+ pts.

Lastly, we have Max Weber (1864 - 1920), the German sociologist and historian who revolutionized the study of culture and history. His work provided a synthesis of Historicist and neo-Kantian approaches. Best known for his work on Protestantism and the development of capitalism.

These men are only the tip of the iceberg. There are countless others whom I omitted. Why did these men become unknown to the modern academic? What happened to this culture of the prolific and deeply serious German academic intellectual? It's a long story and one for another time

My point in all of this is to highlight the decline of academics. Men used to be interested in the cutting edge of historical methodology to revolutionize their understanding of cultures past and present. Now they're little more than regime lickspittles and woke ideologues (ghey)

As a general rule of thumb, I recommend studying the pre-1945 works in any historical, cultural, or "social scientific" discipline. This will lead you to intellectual giants of the Western world. German men with a cleareyed view of both their vocation and the past.

fwiw, there are some modern academics who do produce good work. What comes to mind is Robert Drews and his book The Coming of the Greeks. Fantastic work of prehistory and reminiscent of this older style of bold German scholarship.