Social Science Research Council

What most struck me when I returned to academia as a history editor after seventeen years working in commercial publishing was an apparent general disinterest in the subject of reading. I don’t mean a disinterest in reading as the object of specialized technical investigations into its neurophysiology or its pedagogy. I mean a disinterest in reading in the Enlightenment sense of an autonomous individual citizen’s emancipative cognitive act of self-fashioning in relation to a democratic interpretive community of political equals.