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Meet Jacob Burckhardt, the thinker who invented 'culture' | Jonathan Jones

The visionary Swiss historian helps us understand our world just as much as his contemporary Karl Marx

The bicentenary of the birth of a Swiss historian might not seem the most glamorous of anniversaries. Unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, also born in 1818, Jacob Burckhardt never inspired any revolutions and doesn’t get his face on T-shirts. Yet some of us are celebrating the 200th birthday of Jacob Burckhardt lavishly. This week a British Academy conference reinterprets his intellectual legacy with contributions from leading international scholars and me, kicking off with a public event tonight at the Warburg Institute.

What’s all the fuss about? Take a look at the names of the Guardian’s online sections: opinion, sport, culture ... why culture? Once upon a time, newspapers used to have arts sections. Today, they’ve caught up – very belatedly – with Burckhardt. The use of the term culture to mean a broad and changing flow of forms from opera to video games may seem like an innovation of the postmodern age, but it actually goes back to Burckhardt’s 1860 book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2kCrVXI
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