ABSTRACT
The opening chapter situates and contextualizes 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’ theory of the high culture of European classical modernity has the function of identifying the new dimensions of his theory in relation to the tradition of modern cultural critique, in particular in Western Marxism from Lukács through to the Frankfurt School. Markus’s rethinking of high culture in terms of the paradoxical unity of the arts and the sciences is central to his analytic revision of this tradition. Markus replaces the totalizing narratives of the crisis of culture in modernity by the self-regulating constitution of a society of culture, which owes its reproduction and vitality to the recurrent disputes between the two rival ideologies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
