Critics of Life proposes an alternative genealogy of the concept of form in Germany between 1850 and 1930, charting its transformation into a dynamic term that enabled the modern project of cultural critique in the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic. It describes how form was reconceived from a static shaping force with Platonic overtones into a mobile means of structuration that allowed for internal difference and change: notably, through the idea of the ‘cultural form,’ an object or structure that is read dynamically as an index of historical, social, and epistemological change. The dynamization of form allowed it to become a central term in the renewal of epistemology, and in turn, allowed philosophy to move into the study of culture and its material products, ultimately diffusing and deploying this new conception of form as an aesthetic technique within the feuilleton.

The narrative proposes a genealogy of the cultural form centered around three key figures – the psychologist and philosopher Moritz Lazarus; his student, the philosopher Georg Simmel; and Simmel’s student, the journalist and cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer – who form a continuous lineage that develops the idea of the ‘cultural form’ first postulated by Lazarus in the 1860s. The project puts their development of form into dialogue with contemporaries who were pursuing similar projects, from the liberal publicist Aron Bernstein to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the young critics Georg Lukács and Leo Popper, and the journalist Gabriele Tergit.

First and foremost, the project examines how the invention of the cultural form contributed to the development of a technique of cultural analysis—namely, the form- or object-centered article of the Weimar feuilleton. However, it also sheds light on an interwoven story, arguing that this theoretical transformation of form into a functionalist model was linked (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) to the protagonists’ positionality as German Jews, many of whom were committed liberals in the mode of a Schillerian Bildungsbürgertum that focused on individual self-formation. This becomes apparent in historical responses to antisemitic attacks by thinkers such as Lazarus and Cassirer, who mobilized their theories to argue for liberal notions of the public sphere. I argue that the transformation of form into something constructive, process-oriented, and open to change was, for these thinkers, intertwined with the attempt to forge liberal praxes in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, to posit models of relationality that relied not on essentialized identities, but on shared sets of cultural forms and practices that foregrounded pluralist forms of belonging.

The project begins by laying out the dialogue between Aron Bernstein and Moritz Lazarus in the 1860s that led to the elaboration of the cultural form as a concept for understanding cultural change. It continues by examining the further development of this concept in the philosophies of Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer, and then the attempts of the young (pre-Communist) Georg Lukàcs and his friend Leo Popper to broaden a theory of form inherited from Simmel to literature and art. It culminates in a parallel reading of the canonical Kracauer and the lesser-known Tergit, showing how the cultural form comes to fruition in their writings of the 1920s as an aesthetic technique that leaps over the philosophical debates of the 1900s. Rather, Tergit and Kracauer embrace incomplete, fragmentary, everyday forms in their full structural complexity as potential vehicles for social analysis. Their writings not only make use of, but performatively deploy this optics, thus suggesting that every potential reader might also become a ‘critic of life’—for those who discover that one can analyze the world through its cultural forms can become critics themselves, seeing the world through this new lens.