ELITISM

As Romanticism began to fade, the product of its impact on education became apparent. The emphasis on university-educated specialists began to tell as the number of active classical scholars doubled from 141 working in 1750 onwards to 350 post-1850. Half of these scholars were working in Germany. Because of this the growth of a new predominately German class of educated bourgeoisie, the Bildungsbürgertum, had a huge impact on classical scholarship and European scholarship as a whole.

The Bildungsbürgertum was a bourgeoisie social class. What distinguished them was university level education, which was mainly theological or classical. Certain class traits were widespread; they were defined by insularity, isolationism, and an utmost …show more content…
If anything, the rise of positivism and rationalism left less scope for examination of her role being one of latent power. Nietzsche typifies the era by giving his Dionysus the last words of the story that seem to confirm Ariadne as but an aspect of her man – ‘I am your labyrinth…’ (1888-95).Building upon Hugo’s association of her thread and the theme of progress (1859), Ariadne’s thread began to appear independent of Ariadne herself. ‘Memory’ symbolically holds a ball of thread in Gautier’s Emaux et Camées (1852), though no parallel figure for Ariadne herself is to be found. By the end of the era, 1910, what became the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folktales was published. The tale of Ariadne, once important for Romantics mainly based on her subsequent association with Bacchic power, was instead eventually seen wholly in terms of her thread giving status as the archetypal 313C – the girl as a helper in the hero’s …show more content…
Though one branch of scholars followed the natural progression of Romantic influence on education and became a professional, insular, positivist based community, the other rejected empiricism and rationalism in order to embrace esotericism. This divide was a pre-cursor to the eventual split between Freudian psychoanalysis, seen as scientific and rational, and Jungian analytical phycology, which was purposely un-scientific. Thus the influence of mysticism can be traced from the Romantic age, through its impact on the professional field, to Freud and his followers’ time. This mysticism could go hand in hand with elitism in the form of racial and female denigrating mystic movements such as Ariosophy. Later, however, it emerged as a kind of elitist-defying rejection of scientific Bildungsbürgertum groups – as in Jung’s confidently and openly unscientific