#000578
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume II
Werner Jaeger
The second volume of Werner Jaeger's monumental study of how the Greeks invented the idea of education — paideia — as the deliberate shaping of the whole human being. Subtitled *In Search of the Divine Centre*, it carries the story into the fourth century BC, weighing the physicians of the Hippocratic school, the rhetoric of Isocrates, and above all the moral projects of the Sophists, Socrates, and the early Plato. Jaeger's claim is large: that Greek culture cohered around a shared ideal of forming character through literature, philosophy, and civic life, and that this ideal is the true root of Western humanism. Translated by Gilbert Highet, it reads as intellectual history written with a conviction that the classics still have something urgent to teach — a demanding but rewarding companion to the first volume.
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The author
Werner Jaeger (1888–1961) was the most influential German classicist of his day, holding a chair at Berlin before emigrating to the United States, where he taught at Chicago and then Harvard. He framed Paideia as the centerpiece of a movement he called "Third Humanism," a bid to renew German culture through the Greek ideal of human formation. That project took shape in the 1920s and early 1930s, and Jaeger initially sought a place for it within National Socialist Germany; he emigrated in 1936, in part because his wife was Jewish and he faced the choice of divorcing her or being dismissed. Scholars still argue over how far "Third Humanism" was politically compromised — many maintain it was wrongly conflated with Nazi ideology — so readers should approach its cultural-renewal rhetoric with that debate in mind.
The book
Originally Paideia: Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, the three volumes appeared between 1933 and 1947; Gilbert Highet's English translation followed. This second volume, In Search of the Divine Centre, treats Greek medicine, the Sophists, Isocrates, Socrates, and the early Plato.
How it reads
Erudite, synthetic, and openly idealizing — Jaeger believes Greek culture forms a coherent whole aimed at human excellence. Later classicists find him too tidy and too reverent, but few match his range.
For more context
Bryn Mawr Classical Review's reconsideration and recent studies of Third Humanism situate the work and its politics.
Sources - Paideia — Oxford University Press - Werner Jaeger Reconsidered — Bryn Mawr Classical Review - Werner Jaeger and the Third Humanism — De Gruyter
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Werner Jaeger
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1943
- Edition
- Volume II: In Search of the Divine Centre
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado
Places