In a letter to Hermann Schauenburg, [Jacob Burckhardt] feared that a “social last judgment” was coming; he warned of the “general barbarism” of the “social revolution” and denounced the “tyranny over the spirit carried out under the pretense that education is the secret ally of capitalism which must be destroyed.” Burckhardt, Letter of March 3, 1846, in Gottfried Dietze, introduction to Burckhardt’s Reflections on History
In 1929, Columbia College expanded its one-year Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West into a two-year program, and in 1941 the staff began to focus chiefly on primary source material, which came to include readings in European revolutionary literature from Robespierre to Lenin and, in my CC2 class, Bakunin and Gramsci as well. In 1968, the program was again reduced to a year, but without the sense of purpose and intellectual authority that animated
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