Walter Benjamin had much to say about the intelligentsia, from vicious reviews such as “Left-Wing Melancholy” to the more programmatic essays “Author as Producer” and the Artwork essay. But while the specific allegiances, the “strategies” in the literary battle have been plotted with great precision, a larger debate in which these texts repre…[Read more]

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This paper seeks to shed new light on artistic radicalism by drawing attention to the debate on the crisis of intellectual labor in capitalism. The latter was a hot issue in turn-of-the-century Germany, intrinsically connected with a state-sponsored social reform aiming at the reorganization of the institutions for artistic education and training…[Read more]