Abstract
To date, critical engagement with Arnold Hauser’s sociology of art has been confined to the field of art history. This perspective has ignored Hauser’s interest in literary history, which I argue is essential to his project. Hauser’s dialectical model, composed of conflicting realist and formalist tendencies, extends to the literary sphere. In The Social History of Art, these two traditions are epitomised by the Russian social novel and German idealism. Anti-enlightenment tendencies in German intellectual culture provide Hauser with evidence of idealism’s propensity for escapism and reaction. Conversely, he extols the Russian social novel as the naturalistic art form par excellence. Because the intelligentsia is central to Hauser’s understanding of the formation of literary culture, this paper provides an outline of his sociology of intellectuals. Through a comparison of the German and Russian literary intelligentsia, this paper shows that Hauser’s analysis of literature is often more complex than his sociological interpretations of the visual arts.
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Notes
The first edition of The Social History of Art was published in two volumes. A second edition, which appeared in 1962, was published in four volumes. References in this paper are based on the four-volume third edition published in 1999, edited by Jonathan Harris.
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Berryman, J. A comparison of the German and Russian literary intelligentsia in Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art. Stud East Eur Thought 71, 141–155 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09327-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09327-4