The Dynastic Imagination is a pathbreaking, polyphonic intellectual history of modern dynastic and antidynastic thought. Ranging from the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War I (with an epilogue on the aftermath of World War II), this broad yet highly focused study shows how questions of inheritance and legitimacy underwrite many major intellectual movements, from Romanticism to naturalism to feminism and psychoanalysis.
In the nineteenth century bourgeois writers in Germany were imagining and reimagining broad structures of kinship. But menacingly, they saw the imagination itself, among other aspects of human experience, as something impersonal and deeply informed—if not formed outright—by one’s ancestors. There is a brooding ambivalence to “the dynastic imagination” that Adrian Daub deftly negotiates: namely, individuals’ imagination of the ancestral and the imagination that is itself ancestral, or transindividual. While this book dwells primarily in and around the nuclear family, already the opening essay, “Mediate Family,” plumbs...
