The constitution of cultural modernity

Abstract

The essay situates György Markus’s key writings on cultural modernity in relation to Kant and Hegel’s conception of modern society as a society that knows itself as culture. The reconstruction of Markus’s theory has the function of identifying new dimensions of his theory in relation to the tradition of modern cultural critique. Markus’s rethinking of high culture in terms of the paradoxical unity of the arts and the sciences is central to his revision of this tradition. He replaces the totalizing narratives of the crisis of culture by the self-regulating constitution of a society of culture, which owes its vitality to the recurrent disputes between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.