Ask just about any humanist, and you will hear that the humanities are in a crisis. Facing utilitarian approaches to education, the corporatization of the university, plummeting enrollments, budget cuts, and political critiques from right, left, and center, humanists find themselves on the defensive. Eric Hayot argues that it is time to make a positive case for what the humanities are and what they can become.

Hayot challenges scholars and students in the humanities to rethink and reconsider the work they do. Examining the origins of the humanist ethos in nineteenth-century Germany and tracing its philosophical roots back to Immanuel Kant, Hayot returns to the history of justifications for the humanities in order to build the groundwork for their future development. He develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature of humanist intellectual work and lays out a series of principles that undergird this core idea. Together, they constitute a provocative intellectual and practical program for a new way of thinking about the humanities, humanist thought, and their role in the university and beyond. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

"Humanist Reason proves that it is possible to launch a full-blown defense of the humanities that is centered not around discrete humanistic results or skills, but around what they contribute to the way in which we view and construct knowledge altogether." - 3 Quarks Daily

"Students presently earning degrees in humanities and interdisciplinary studies will benefit from the situational awareness this text brings to the seemingly endless debates regarding the role of the humanities. But the book will be most useful to chairs, deans, and university leadership defending the liberal arts in the trenches. For them, Hayot’s innovative reorganization of undergraduate courses of study and his 'nine articles of humanist reason' will be excellent grist for the mill." - Choice Reviews

"Hayot writes with the lucidity that matches his commitment to rational debate. He bravely threads the needle where others might stay vague." - Public Books

"Challenges us to think anew about what it might mean to engage in a practice overtly identified as humanist reason." - German Quarterly

"This book is a clarion call for institutions to overcome the departmental and disciplinary divides that have distorted public understanding by privileging disciplines that generate laws, generalizations and data over and above those that emphasize interpretation and contextualization." - Inside Higher Ed