In this complex and theoretically sophisticated book, Dominic Boyer offers an astute anthropological engagement with the sociology of knowledge, tracing the shifting theories and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries to East German journalists’ conceptions of modernity and national culture. Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Boyer covers an enormous range of diffuse topics (intellectuals, expertise, professionalism, dialectics of knowledge, media, journalism, public culture, and social identity formation) without, however, coming to any salient conclusions. The book would have benefited from more careful editing. In this work, Boyer explores the role of agency in the struggle between the “system,” a master trope for an external, imposed “social totality” (p. 8), and the “spirit,” a metaphor for the moral subject. This juxtaposition emerges as a tensive relation that Boyer conceives as a dialectical project.

The focus on “dialectical social knowledge” is the primary theme of this work. In the introduction, Boyer states,

With “dialectical social knowledge,” I mean specifically knowledges of social dynamics, relations, and forms that center on perceived ontological tensions between the temporality of potentiality and actuality and between the spatiality of interiority and exteriority. … More importantly, dialectical knowledge saturates everyday knowledges and modes of knowing selves, others, cultures, and histories. [pp. 10–11]

Although at times highly abstract in his discursive narrative, presenting long passages devoid of the decipherable performance of human subjects, Boyer illuminates this modus of knowledge production through German history, beginning with 19th-century political theory and philosophy and concluding with the 20th-century era of postunification, albeit here with an almost exclusive focus on the former socialist East. Boyer argues at length that
dialectical social knowledge emerges in the tension between the knowing subject and the compromising forces and conditions of epistemic context. … Only in synthesizing a phenomenological attention to the epistemic individual with a broader “social phenomenological” analysis of the response of intellectual activity to its social environment in intellectual culture … one comes to understand the dialectical social knowledge in its full complexity. [p. 17]

Boyer attempts to disentangle these assertions over the next 300 pages.

Boyer’s thematic and central focus, particularly the “phenomenological attention to the epistemic individual” is sometimes lost in the elaborate discussions of historical formations, in which the emergence of collective imaginaries is privileged over the knowing subject. This is especially the case in chapter 2, “The Bildungsbürgertum and the Dialectics of Germanness in the Long Nineteenth Century” (pp. 46–98), and in chapter 3, “Dialectical Politics of Cultural Redemption in the Third Reich and the GDR” (pp. 99–159). Although these chapters provide an interesting overview, the thread of the argument, as outlined in the introduction, could have been more carefully attended to. In his attention to public discourses, Boyer tends to erase the dialectical knowledge production of the ontological subject. In his discussions about the dialectics of Germanness, one finds a curious nonattention to the linguistic medium: the centrality of the German language to the dialectics of a national imaginary. This is disconcerting because language has been historically treated as the exterior manifestation of the interior spirit, thereby linking citizenship and national authenticity to linguistic competency in contemporary Germany. Likewise, one finds no mention of organicity, race, or body in Boyer’s analysis. Intellectualism takes on an uncannily ephemeral quality.

In his last two chapters, Boyer brings his ethnographic engagement into clear focus. Here, with contextual attention, the labor of knowledge formation is documented in the analysis of everyday practices among eastern German journalists. Yet in reading through the prisms of what Boyer terms “dialectical social knowledges of self, other, and system,” one cannot but pose the question whether just any juxtaposition—east–west, past–present, nationals–regionals—can be legitimately analyzed as “dialectical apparitions” (p. 180) that provide the basis for “dialectical knowing” (p. 242). What sorts of knowledge productions are not dialectical? And if all knowing is dialectical in principle, then what does this complex exegesis tell readers about German society and subjectivities?

Much intellectual and emotional labor went into the production of this book. Unfortunately, given the highly abstract and theoretical nature of this publication, many readers will be perplexed rather than enlightened. Boyer has, nevertheless, provided a valuable text for sophisticated scholars interested in the sociology of knowledge and European (German) intellectual history.