Jakob Norberg

Jakob Norberg’s (Ph.D. 2008, Princeton University) research explores conceptions of community in German thought and literature. His first book, Sociability and Its Enemies (2014), examines the search for non-authoritarian forms of collective life after the end of the Second World War and focuses on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Jürgen Habermas. The second book, The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2022), reveals how Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm viewed philologists as arbiters of national identity, even adjudicators of national territory, and therefore as experts indispensable to the modern nation state. A book on the anti-nationalist, anti-collectivist political stance of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer entitled "Schopenhauer's Politics" is currently in progress. Norberg's articles in literary studies locate the communal in literature by reconstructing how non-individual, collective voices appear in modern literary works in the form of jargon, clichés and commonplaces. His work has appeared in such venues as PMLA, Arcadia, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, Textual Practice, Telos, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought.

Select Recent Publications

“Schopenhauer’s Critique of Nationalism.” The German Quarterly 95.3 (2022): 277–292. 

“Schopenhauer’s Critique of the State.” Forthcoming in The Schopenhaurian Mind. Ed. David  Bather Woods. Routledge, 2022. 

“Philologisierung der Politik: Das Volk bei Jacob Grimm.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie  Beiheft 18 (2020): 119–132. 

“Der Philologenkönig: Zum Machtanspruch der Grimmschen Sprachwissenschaft.” WestEnd:  Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (2020): 25–40.   

“Anti-Capitalist Affect: Georg Lukács on Satire and Hate.” New German Critique 135 (2018): 155–174. 

Specializations

• Political Theory
• Intellectual and Cultural History
• Twentieth Century
• Nineteenth Century

Curriculum Vitae