Zeitgeist

:This article is about the German word. For other articles using that word see Zeitgeist (disambiguation).

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Zeitgeist is originally a German expression that means "the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)". It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. (collective consciousness, collective unconscious in psychology)

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The concept of zeitgeist goes back to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. However the word itself was coined by the philologist Christian Adolph Klotz in 1769, when he translated the Latin genius seculi (genius meaning guardian spirit and saeculum century) into the German zeitgeist.

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Zeitgeist has achieved a unique status among German loanwords in other tongues, having found an entrance into English, Spanish, Japanese and even Dutch.

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It is a term that refers to the ethos of a cohort of people, that spans one or more subsequent generations, who despite their diverse age and socio-economic background experience a certain worldview, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression. Zeitgeist is the experience of a dominant cultural climate that defines, particularly in Hegelian thinking, an era in the dialectical progression of a people or the world at large.

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German: German may mean:...

Geist: The word Geist has many meanings, which include:...

Collective consciousness: The French social theorist ?mile Durkheim (1858-1917) used the term collective consciousness in his The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)....