Songs of Experience

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are Refractions of Violence (2003), The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923 - 1950 (second edition, California, 1996), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (California, 1993), and Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (California, 1984).

"Few in the humanities can rival Jay's omnivorousness or match his intellectual energy." - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books "Songs of Experience is at once modest and extraordinarily ambitious. The erudition on display in this sweeping account of a central concept in Western philosophy over several hundred years is a wonder; the writing is clear, and the scholarship breathtaking. But it is modest in the sense that it does not announce its own point of view with any emphasis. Instead, the reader benefits from the author's openness to thinkers as unalike as Schleiermacher and Rorty, Oakeshott and Bataille. Jay makes sense of each thinker on his own terms - and that's because with his intellectual openness and his conceptual mediation, Jay indeed practices what he is so lightly preaching. An intellectual historian at the top of his game, he has shared his own experience of these ideas, texts, and writers. After reading this book, we can too." - Michael Roth, Bookforum "A magisterial study of one of the most elusive, contested, and pervasively important concepts of the Western philosophical tradition." - Richard Shusterman, author of Pragmatist Aesthetics"

• Introduction 1. The Trial of "Experience": From the Greeks to Montaigne and Bacon 2. Experience and Epistemology: The Contest between Empiricism and Idealism 3. The Consolations of Religious Experience: Schleiermacher, James, Otto and Buber 4. Returning to the Body through Aesthetic Experience: From Kant to Dewey 5. Politics and Experience: Burke, Oakeshott and the English Marxists 6. History and Experience: Dilthey, Collingwood, Scott and Ankersmit 7. The Cult of Experience in American Pragmatism: James, Dewey and Rorty 8. Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno 9. The Poststructuralist Reconstitution of Experience: Bataille, Barthes and Foucault Conclusion