How to Rethink the Global History of Knowledge Making from a Central European Perspective

We are publishing this article in conjunction with the conference Empire of Circulation: Habsburg Knowledge in Its Global Setting.

Empire of Circulation

The Habsburg Monarchy constituted a linguistic, religious, and legal patchwork that was conditioned both by its internal diversity and the region’s centuries-long imbrications and entanglements with the adjacent Ottoman, Spanish, and Holy Roman Empires. It was what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone,” one that bred innovation.1 Moreover, Central European scholars and scientists creatively grasped and shaped the religious and linguistic plurality of the Habsburg imperial polity, and they did so by entangling their region with the wider world.2 They tweaked, deracinated, and readjusted practices across contexts. They compared, translated, and amalgamated bodies of knowledge, unfolding a set of activities and processes that recent historians of knowledge have termed “circulation.”

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Education for a Free Society? Ancient Knowledge, Universities, and the Neoliberal Disorder

Often remembered as a critique of Keynesian economics, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) contained two other important assertions about the future of liberalism. Buried in the thirteenth chapter—”The Totalitarians in Our Midst”—of Hayek’s bestseller was a discussion of the fundamental relationship between knowledge and liberalism. Hayek posited there that the humanities represented the road to freedom, whereas science represented the road to totalitarianism: “serfdom.” In particular, he singled out the idea, common among socialists at the time, that science could serve as a basis for new moral laws and social betterment. He called this idea “German” and labeled it anti-liberal. Only insights from the humanities, he claimed, could provide an ethical culture for the liberalism of the future. Hayek depicted a progressive science as authoritarian and the traditional humanities as freeing.

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