Mosse's Recasting of European Intellectual and Cultural History

Abstract

George Mosse wrote European intellectual and cultural history in a way that recast its meaning. Because he did so without a specific theoretical program, the extent of his accomplishment in this regard at times went unnoticed. He was a member of the remarkable generation of European refugee historians who together formed the core of the American study of European culture and ideas in the postwar era. For his contemporaries, such as H. Stuart Hughes, Peter Gay, Leonard Krieger, Carl Schorske, and Fritz Stern, writing European intellectual history meant two things. First, it was a salvage operation, an effort to recall and preserve the traditions of humanism and liberalism destroyed by fascism and Nazism. Second, and related to that task, it entailed writing about other intellectuals—philosophers, social theorists, and novelists and artists of the first rank—who represented the best that had been thought in Europe.