Lecture
Friday, Dec 10, 2021, 3:30 PM

Eckart Goebel

Tübingen

Die Einsamkeit der Ambition. Alexis de Tocqueville über den Ehrgeiz in einer Gesellschaft der Gleichen

(The Loneliness of Ambition: Alexis de Tocqueville on Ambition in a Society of Equals)

My talk discusses several aspects of the relationship between ambition and loneliness as epitomized by the saying, “It’s lonely at the top”—and that may result from the need to conceal ambitions to prevent possible embarrassment. In the second part, I turn to Alexis de Tocqueville’s theses about a modern “society of equals” that puts everyone in competition and that encloses individuals in ever-deeper levels of loneliness. Tocqueville’s superb analysis, which grew out of his study of the early United States, brings him astonishingly close to Friedrich Engels, who in The Condition of the Working Class in England argues that overcoming modern loneliness will only be possible after eliminating societal competition.


Eckart Goebel
studied comparative literature, philosophy, and German literature at the Free University of Berlin and at Oxford. In 1995, he received his Ph.D. for a work on the late Weimar Republic, which was later published as Konstellation und Existenz. Kritik der Geschichte um 1930: Studien zu Heidegger, Benjamin, Jahnn und Musil (1996). From 1996 to 2005 he was a resident scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. In 2001 he completed his habilitation with a study on loneliness and the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre (Der engagierte Solitär: Die Gewinnung des Begriffs Einsamkeit aus der Phänomenologie der Liebe im Frühwerk Jean-Paul Sartres). From 2005 to 2015, he was a professor of German literature at New York University, and from 2013 to 2014 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2015 was appointed professor of German philology and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen. His recent publications include Ehrgeiz: Dynamiken zweckrationaler Passion (2020); Esmeralda: Deutsch-französische Verhältnisse in Thomas Manns “Doktor Faustus” (2015); Jenseits des Unbehagens: “Sublimierung” von Goethe bis Lacan (2009) and Charis und Charisma: Grazie und Gewalt von Winckelmann bis Heidegger (2006).
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