Kyle Baasch

My research is broadly concerned with the role of the humanities in the modern world. I am particularly interested in the tension between traditional cultural values and the growth of modern scientific consciousness throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Anglophone and German-speaking intellectual contexts.

In my dissertation, I investigate the entanglement of politics and humanistic inquiry through a comparative analysis of several cultural theorists who sought to establish a new methodological foundation for the human sciences at the end of the First World War: principally Erich von Kahler, Oswald Spengler, and Walter Benjamin, along with several of their European and American contemporaries. Although these writers are often juxtaposed as exponents of divergent positions on the interwar ideological spectrum, my contention is that they were in fact united by a politically ambiguous interest in formulating a new paradigm of holistic cultural interpretation that would serve as an antidote to the corrosive rationality and myopic specialization of modern disciplinary research. My dissertation examines the most ambitious manifestations of this current of experimental scholarship in order to extract the rough outlines of a capacious interpretive paradigm that remains available to the humanities today while also offering a set of meditations on the responsibility of scholarship in moments of political and spiritual uncertainty.

Beyond this, I am perennially interested in the history of methodological disputes in the study of culture and society, particularly controversies that draw attention to the heterogeneity of German, French, and Anglo-American philosophical and scientific traditions. My writings on the competing legacies of "critical theory" in the postwar European and American academic landscape have appeared in Radical Philosophy, Historical Materialism, and Telos.