Caspar Hirschi

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Caspar Hirschi (born April 16, 1975 in Zurich ) is a Swiss historian . He is Professor of General History at the University of St. Gallen .

His research focuses on the history and theory of nationalism , the early modern scholarly culture, the organization of scientific institutions, and the roles of the critic, experts and intellectuals since the Enlightenment .

Life

Caspar Hirschi studied history and German literature at the Universities of Freiburg im Üechtland and Tübingen from 1995 and graduated in 2001 with a master’s degree . From 2001 to 2006 he worked as an assistant in Freiburg and was there in 2004 on the subject of nationalism in the age of humanism and Reformation doctorate . As part of his habilitation project on The Republic of Letters. Scholarly Self-Fashioning in England and France, 1715-1775 he researched and taught from 2007 to 2010 as a Fellow at Clare College of Cambridge University . From 2010 to 2013 he was an Ambizione scholarship holder of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the professorship for science research at ETH Zurich . He has been Professor of History at the University of St. Gallen since 2012, succeeding Rolf Peter Sieferle . He has been a member of the evaluation committee of the German Science Council since 2014 .

Caspar Hirschi has been a freelancer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 2006 . Since 2011 he has been co-editor of the magazine Nach Feierabend. The Zurich yearbook for the history of knowledge . He is the scientific advisory board member of NZZ-Geschichte and from 2019 one of the guest commentators of NZZ am Sonntag .

Order and disorder of knowledge

In an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on February 13, 2010, he puts the criticism of representatives of the established universities on Wikipedia in a historical context that goes back to the beginnings of the Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment . With its egalitarian working principle, Wikipedia violates the order of knowledge according to which public truth claims are a social privilege conferred by educational institutions. In the long term, Wikipedia's only hope is to change this order by integrating or marginalizing the academic elite . In both cases, this elite would suffer a loss of reputation , and to this extent one can understand that Wikipedia evokes defensive reflexes among academics.

In the dispute over the claim of Wikipedia as a recognized reference work , he sees the new edition of a power struggle that authors of the Académie française and authors of other authors who did not have the aura of an academy of nobility in the 17th century fought. As a representative of an “anti-authoritarian counter-model”, he leads u. a. the Dictionnaire de Trévoux , a reference work written by anonymous Jesuits . The authors of the Dictionnaire attacked the Academy with the argument that it was like a “sovereign court” that had the right to pass judgments without giving an account, while they themselves had to be regarded as lawyers “who are only credible to the extent that they are than they are based on good reasons or reliable testimony ».

The Encyclopédie by Diderot and D'Alembert successfully combined “rhetoric of reason and power, criticism and imitation of the academy” and finally fought for a “new, enlightening authority”. The union of the “incompatible, an egalitarian elitism” has not yet reached Wikipedia.

The reason for Hirschi's essay was an article by Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff in the New Yorker , in which she introduces a Wikipedia author with the pseudonym Essjay who, according to her, is a theology professor at an American university. The renowned author had not done a proper research, the pseudonym stood for the 24-year-old Ryan Jordan, who had adorned himself with false titles. Amazingly, while Jordan lost his job and was publicly pilloried, the journalist's reputation was not damaged. Hirschi's conclusion of this incident: "The inequality of treatment has a certain logic, because an invented title is more threatening to the western knowledge economy than bad research: it introduces counterfeit money into the competition for credibility."

Fonts

  • Competition of Nations. Constructions of a German community of honor at the turn of the Middle Ages to the modern age. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-936-8 (also revised dissertation at the University of Freiburg im Üechtland , 2004).
  • The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, ISBN 978-0-521-76411-7 .
  • Between lead desert and flood of images. Forms and functions of the humanities book. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2015 (Yearbook of the International Society for Book Studies). ISBN 978-3-447-10474-6 .
  • Scandal experts, expert scandals: on the history of a contemporary problem. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-95757-525-8 .

Articles (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ After work. The Zurich yearbook for the history of knowledge.
  2. ↑ NZZ am Sonntag. Ronnie Grob's comment was canceled. In: persoenlich.com . 7th December 2018.
  3. ↑ Caspar Hirschi: Order and disorder of knowledge. In: NZZ. February 13, 2010, p. 24.
personal data
SURNAME Hirschi, Caspar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1975
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich