IN PREPARING THIS ESSAY I discovered that rereading Hermann Broch's Die Schlafwandler after having been away from it for several years is like taking a literary Rorschach test. You discover what is really on your own mind at the moment of critical reception. I was very impressed, for example, with how cleverly Broch had anticipated the business metaphors and practices that would dominate every part of our lives — and perhaps most annoyingly our academic lives — over the past decade. I was convinced that Broch had understood resource-centered management and its ruthless and dehumanizing consequences long before it debilitated a number of American universities in the 1980s and 90s. I was sure that Broch had foreseen the fact that business models and management schools would monopolize university life — and that we would end up with a Harvard MBA as our president.

But I then recalled that every time I had read Broch's trilogy, I was equally impressed with his prescience. When I first encountered the “Huguenau” section twenty-eight years ago, I presumed that Broch had predicted Adolf Hitler and had described what facilitated his rise to power. When I taught the book ten years ago, I would have sworn he had foreknown the philosophical positions of post-structuralism and deconstruction. Five years ago, I was certain that Broch had scooped both Hayden White and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Strangely enough, despite being painfully and self-consciously aware of what we might term the “prophetic fallacy,” I am not sure these readings of Broch as seer of the Twentieth Century are that far afield.