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. The third book Schopenhauer's Politics (Cambridge University Press 2025) reconstructs Schopenhauer’s anti-collectivist, anti-nationalist political philosophy. 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 Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2025.  

“On the Sofa: Bettina von Arnim’s Everyday Romanticism.” Forum Vormärz Forschung 30 (2024): 105–18.  

“Revolutionary Romanticism: Carl Schmitt on Bettina von Arnim.” Germanic Review 99.4 (2024): 533–48. 

“The Infinite Conversation: Carl Schmitt on Parliamentarism and Romanticism.” Telos 208 (2024): 27–41. 

“Schopenhauer on the Injustice of Slavery.” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch/Schopenhauer Yearbook 104 (2023): 29–47.   

Specializations

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

Curriculum Vitae