Nicholas Boyle(b. 1946) is the Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. He is probably best known for his biography of Goethe, still in progress (volume 1, 1991, volume 2, 2000. He is also the author of Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998), a volume of essays on the contemporary world, and Sacred and Secular Scriptures: a Catholic approach to literature (2004). His most recent books are German Literature. A Very Short Introduction (2008) and a further study of globalization: 2014. How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). He was the General Editor of The Impact of Idealism. The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought (4 vols., 2013). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Corresponding Fellow of the Göttingen Academy, and holds an honorary degree from Georgetown University.
Nicholas Boyce
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Goethe’s Faust and the socioeconomic roots of modern subjectivity
The modern individual is the point of intersection of the processes of consumption and production. The subjective representation of these processes has been determined by two branches of the modern middle class, the bourgeoisie, which has privileged consumption, and the bureaucracy, which has privileged production.