Abstract

In this essay Robert Davis provides a critical roadmap, which is also a genealogy, for understanding and examining the history of both the humanities and education in them. It relates appraisal of the so-called “crisis” in contemporary teaching of the humanities to a deeper understanding of crisis as a condition for periodic reassessment and renewal of the humanities that has recurred at a number of key historical conjunctures since the early modern period, most notably at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and at the coming of industrialization and mass education more than a century later. Davis focuses on the traditionalist defense of the humanities as a route to the humane while also acknowledging the power of the poststructuralist critique of this agenda and its complicity with the moral failures of Western society and imperialism. He concludes the essay by advocating a position “beyond critique” where the humanities and education in them can attain a new universalism and material relevance