Circulating Knowledge in Public Arenas: Towards a New History of the Postwar Humanities

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how a new history of the postwar humanities could be written. Drawing on approaches from the history of knowledge and other adjacent fields, it outlines a study of the conditions of the circulation of knowledge in the public sphere during the 1960s and 1970s. By introducing “arena of knowledge” as an analytical concept, the essay highlights certain media platforms where circulation of knowledge occurred, such as newspapers, paperback series, and early television. All in all, the essay underlines the importance of the humanities for a kind of public knowledge during these years, thereby challenging a crisis narrative of the humanities of the postwar period that is prevalent in established historiography.