Salomon's ark: Experience, history, and the life of the mind

Abstract

Albert Salomon's work as a writer and teacher was characterized by a remarkable intellectual diversity and historical scope. His writings in intellectual history include essays on Erasmus, Fontenelle, Adam Smith, Goethe, DeTocqueville, Burckhardt, Max Weber and the Durkheim School, to mention just a few (see Salomon, 1962; 1934, 1935a, 1935b). He also published essays and a book on the problem of progress and modern culture (Salomon, 1946, 1955) and wrote on other topics of contemporary interest, including the spirit of the soldier and Nazi militarism (Salomon, 1942a), humanism and the higher learning in America (Salomon, 1938, 1942b), and the relationship of the literary artist to society (Salomon, 1962). The historical scope of his work ranged from discussions of ancient Stoicism to the most recent debates in educational philosophy. He covered the European landscape from the British to the French, Germans and Dutch, and he did not forget to speak also of America. His lectures and courses exhibited an equally broad reach. They in? cluded offerings on (among other things) Dilthey, Simmel, Balzac, Montaigne, social roles, the problem of intellectuals, political sociology and the study of revolutions, and ? perhaps most remarkable ? a course in 1958 on the sociology of the emotions, a subject only recently recognized by the American Sociological Association as a legitimate sub-specialty in the sociological profession (see the listings in Salomon, n.d.). I will want to say more later in this talk about the course on Dilthey. For the present, I will only add that the intellectual diversity represented in Salomon's work places him among the ranks of those "good Europeans" about whom Nietzsche wrote, "with an eye beyond all merely local, merely nationally