Ingrid Schreiber

My research interests lie in the social and political philosophy of the long eighteenth century and in twentieth-century theory and historiography, with a focus on Enlightenment, modernity, subjectivity, solitude, gender, and social pathology.

My DPhil, entitled "Solitude and Sociability in the late German Enlightenment, 1756-1807," takes as its starting point the curious incongruity during the Enlightenment between the celebration of autonomy and the contemporaneous criticism of isolation, of egoism, of solipsism, and of esotericism. What distinguished a commendable independence from a pathological isolation? When was "aloneness" a preferable alternative to sociability?

To answer these questions, I study the work of three Prussian thinkers: political economist Christian Jakob Kraus (1753-1807), philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and writer and advocate for women's emancipation Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796). By my reading, each of these thinkers articulated a model of the independent self as a specifically social entity, such that being alone was conducive or even essential to community: solitude could lead to sociability. This unsettles the supposed "solitary turn" thesis of European modernity: the notion that the late eighteenth century brought about a kind of sickly revolution inwards, whether in proto-capitalism or liberalism, Romanticism, post-Kantian philosophy, or the rise of the private sphere. Instead of such teleological narratives, where solitude and sociability are emplotted chronologically in service of a critique of modernity, I aim to demonstrate their complex coexistence in Enlightenment intellectual culture.

My research has been generously supported by the University of Oxford, Wadham College, the German History Society, the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), the Berlin University Alliance, and the British Federation for Women Graduates.

You can read more about my work here and here. I also co-convene an online interdisciplinary reading group on the Enlightenment which can be joined here.