Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer's "Spirit and System" exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced German's conceptions of modernity and national culture. Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness" - that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life - is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.

"Spirit and System is a brilliant book. It is nothing short of an ethnographic examination both of German post-reunification society and anthropological theory. This is not only a methodological tour de force, it is also ethnographically sensitive and an original and experientially grounded introduction to one of the central problems of German and, indeed, European ethnology." - Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University"

Dominic Boyer is assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University.