Democracy and Facism: From Europe to America Author(s): Peter Rutkoff and William B. Scott Source: State, Culture, and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 26-60 Published by: Springer Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20006792 Accessed: 13-02-2020 21:35 UTC

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This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Democracy and Facism: From Europe to America

by Peter Rutkoff and William B. Scott

War in Our Times, a study by European emigre scholars, was aimed at the tragedy of appeasement. Edited by Hans Speier, the volume examined the failure of parliamentary democracy during the Weimar Republic as an explanation for Munich.1 Its authors, the individuals who formed the Graduate Faculty at the New School, drew on their experiences in postwar European politics. As refugee intellec? tuals they believed that it was their duty to educate. Between 1933 and 1939 as sociologists, economists, and political scientists, these Euro? pean ?migr?s at the New School addressed the most important issue of their era: the nature of German and Italian fascism. They concluded that fascism was intimately bound up with the political democratiza? tion of European society. Indeed, they viewed fascism's success a consequence of the failure of parliamentary democracy. They argued that fascism was part of a larger social-political phenomenon which they called "totalitarianism" that encompassed the political extremes of left and right. This conclusion entailed a significant alteration of their own social and theoretical perspectives as they formulated a "totalitarian model" in the context of New Deal Liberalism. The Graduate Faculty compared the United States with Weimar Ger? many. Both were democratic and progressive, but in Germany fascism triumphed while in the United States democratic forms prevailed. Only by reorienting political democracy consistent with the ideals of eighteenth-century liberalism, they argued, could totalitarianism be checked.2 As intellectuals of the Left they viewed the crises of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union as indicative of the formal weakness of parliamentary democracy. In the 1930s at the New School, these ?migr? social scientists modified the most Utopian of their theoretical commitments as they affirmed the cosmopolitan values which they believed were inherent in the Enlightenment. They emphasized toler? ance, free discourse, and reason based on human plurality rather than cultural, national, or racial exclusivity. Only by avoiding the failures 26

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of Weimar's simple majoritarianism could the West resist the onslaught of authoritarian dictatorships. They came to believe that both fascism and communism, each of which promised a classless society or a "pure" community, were caused by an excess of egalitar ianism. As Social Democrats they earlier had been critical of the inequalities inherent in a liberal society. By the late 1930s they had decided that such inequities were of small moment compared to the unthinkable alternative of "totalitarianism." Only a liberal democracy that embraced tolerance, civil equality, and full political participation could escape the "totalitarian" consequences of a classless society in which the state ruthlessly enforced its communal ethic. Moreover, the Graduate Faculty developed a definition of "totalitarianism" which became a central ingredient of postwar defenses of American political institutions as they came to believe that only the United States embodied the ideas and institutions of the Enlightenment. As dean of the University in Exile and then of the Graduate Faculty, Emil Lederer prepared the way for the Graduate Faculty's shift from the more Utopian perspective of democratic socialism to a revelation of "democratic liberalism." Together with philosopher and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, Lederer voiced the gathering concerns of the Graduate Faculty. For him, the existence of the University in Exile, itself, became proof of the validity of American political institutions. In 1932, less than a year before his appointment to the University in Exile, Lederer's colleagues and former students, on his fiftieth birthday, celebrated his scholarly accomplishments. As professor of political economy at the University of Berlin, Lederer was considered by the Rockefeller Foundation as Germany's leading social theorist. For his birthday celebration he returned to the University of Heidelberg, where he had taught from 1910 to 1931. Prior to 1919 Heidelberg had been a center of academic and political dissent. Here, Lederer had participated in the intellectually charged salon of Max and Marianne Weber as well as joined the Young Socialists along with his friend and life-long associate Hans Staudinger. At Heidelberg, Lederer also established friendships with Karl Mannheim, Hans Speier, and Carlo Mierendorff. On his return in 1932 Lederer acknowl? edged these formative influences. In a birthday salute, Mierendorff, a former student and active social Democrat, identified Lederer's intel? lectual roots. Mierendorff described Lederer as Weber's successor as the intellectual and spiritual leader of Germany's post-war democratic Left. Recalling Weber's untimely death, Mierendorff said, "It was our misfortune that we lost that teacher so soon." Above all, he recalled, it was Weber who had "taught us that we must act."3 As a political 27

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms economist Weber had combined historical with theoretical analysis. In 1905 he published his classic statement on capitalism and the Protes? tant ethic as well as his landmark essay on the problem of objectivity in the social sciences.4 The first dealt with the "rationalization" of modern society while the second examined the limits of scientific knowledge when applied to political issues. In 1919, just months after the armistice, Weber returned to these subjects at the University of Munich. Addressing what he called the "vocations of science and politics," he urged Germany's new student generation to embrace both the ideals of scientific objectivity and political responsibility. Mieren? dorff, who was in the audience, understood the speech as an admoni? tion to act in defense of the newly established republic. Weber's argument in favor of an objective social science rested on a barely articulated Kantian notion of mind. For Weber, the social world which humans had created was knowable through analytic constructs or "ideal types."5 Nonetheless, he believed that social science could not establish the "scientific" validity of criteria which deter? mined political choices. Rather, questions of value or ethics began where scientific questions left off. Individuals still had to choose. Science could not do this for them. But, in affirming such freedom Weber rejected what he saw as the limits of Marxist and positivistic determinism. Weber exhibited a profound ambivalence towards mod? ern, rationalized, and bureaucratic society. Deeply attached to the notions of scholarly inquiry, an intellectually free university, and political responsibility Weber's famous image of the "iron cage" expressed his misgivings.6 In 1919, in the last year of his life, he not only admonished his Munich audience to act "for politics," but he acted by participating in the Weimar government. For Lederer, Mierendorff, Speier, and Staudinger, a Social Demo? cratic Germany offered no such foreboding "iron cage." A socialist democracy promised to fulfill their dreams. In the 1920s Mierendorff, Speier, and Staudinger became political activists while Lederer served on the Weimar Socialization Commission. Each believed that they were faithfully following Weber's example. In 1931 Lederer received a full professorship at the University of Berlin, replacing Werner Sombart whom he had earlier succeeded as co-editor of Weber's journal, the Archive. By 1932 Lederer had established himself as Weber's successor and was known as "the Berlin sociologist." Born to an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family, Lederer had studied law and economics under Joseph Schumpeter in Vienna. He completed his studies in Berlin. In 1910 he abandoned a brief law career to accept a teaching appointment at Heidelberg where he met Weber, as well as 28

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the young socialist radicals, Rudolf Hilferding and Otto Braun. Through his Hungarian wife, whose Christianity he had accepted on their marriage, Lederer also became friends with the Marxist critic Georg Luk?cs. Under Weber's influence Lederer studied the relation? ship between society and politics and the role of government in social change. Before the war, as a Social Democrat, in a series of articles, he criticized the facade of Wilhelmian parliamentarianism as well as the awesome military power of the German state. For Lederer, democratic socialism offered an ethical system which would release humans from the bonds of economic and political repression.7 Intellectually eclectic, Lederer rejected the mechanistic Marxism characteristic of so many contemporary socialists as he drew from both Weber and Schumpeter. Lederer saw, in Weimar, the means to realize his hopes to create a popularly based and, ultimately, classless society. But the combination of self-serving trade unionism, business cartelization, and conservative fiscal policy all seemed to deflect Weimar's course. As a result, Lederer became a critic of Weimar policies as he called for extensive economic and social plan? ning. Yet, as a sociologist, influenced by Schumpeter's and Weber's ideas of the progressive rationalization of state authority and its tendency toward total control, Lederer remained sensitive to the possible abuse of power. He believed that new social movements contained the potential to unleash political forces which threatened the very bases of democratic life. In this manner, Lederer tempered his socialist vision with a belief that western democratic structures were extremely fragile. By the late 1920s he came to see the failure of Weimar as a warning to the West as a whole. Lederer's early scholarly work in the United States, which he published in the first issues of Social Research, outlined these tensions.8 As an advocate of economic intervention and state planning, he declared, "We cannot rely solely on the operation of economic laws." Continued loyalty to anachronistic free-market theories in the face of the depression would lead only "to the quietude of a cemetery."9 In reflecting on the Weimar debacle Lederer concluded that it had been as much a political as economic failure. Hitler was the stepchild of ineffective planning brought about by indecisive leaders. Only resolute political decisions, based on informed understandings of social reality could have "prevented the destruction of democratic guaranties."10 Such leadership had to come from outside the normal democratic political process. Social scientists committed to the ideals of democracy had to be willing to transcend their scholarly preoccupations and provide the intellectual and ethical leadership necessary to create a 29

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms humane and democratic society.11 Lederer's activist commitments typified his colleagues in the University in Exile. During the 1930s Hans Speier, Hans Staudinger, Frieda Wunderlich, Max Ascoli, and Max Wertheimer, each reflected on the causes of fascism and each agreed with Lederer that a socialist democracy untempered by liber? tarian limitations was as likely to lead to a fascist counterrevolution as to a humane social transformation. In the late 1920s Lederer had been highly critical of Weimar for failing to align the German middle class with the Republic. He was convinced that in European society, and particularly in Germany, the most important group was not the working class, but the "new" salaried, middle class.12 Lederer was assisted in his study of the new middle class by one of his colleagues, economist Jacob Marschak, and by his graduate assistant, Hans Speier. Their work not only estab? lished the crucial role of the "new" or salaried, middle class in the European political economy, but also provided the basis for their notion of "mass" politics. Born in the Ukraine and educated in Kiev, Marschak joined the Mensheviks and in 1919 served briefly as Minister of Labor in the Georgian Republic. With the Republic's collapse, Marschak came to Germany. He received his formal academic training at Berlin and then Heidelberg, where he met Lederer. He published his first formal paper in Germany in the 1920s. Forced to leave Germany in 1933, Marschak received an appointment as director of the Oxford Institute of Statistics in England. While in England he wrote several articles on the measurement of consumption, including an article on the theory of wages for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. A pioneer econome trician, Marschak served as a member of the New School's Graduate Faculty from 1939 to 1943. In 1977 at the time of his death, he was president-elect of the American Economic Association.13 Marschak was influenced by the thought of both Weber and Lederer. In Economy and Society, Weber had compared capitalist and socialist economies. Marschak disputed Weber's claim of the inherent inefficiency of a socialist economy. He also shared Lederer's belief that the "new middle class," not the working class, was critical for a stable democracy. Lederer and Marschak summarized their common con? cerns in The New Middle Class (1930).14 In their description of postwar Germany they revised some of the myths of "scientific" socialism. They argued that the appearance of new social groups required new theoretical and practical perspectives?perspectives which German socialists lacked. The war had destroyed the traditional social order in Germany. Throwing aside earlier Marxist predictions that the busi 30

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ness cycle would inevitably create an expanding factory proletariat, they, instead, suggested that in postwar Germany a new social group had emerged which had not existed before the war. The combined effects of war and economic centralization had created both unprece? dented industrial concentration and social dislocation. The disappear? ance of independent proprietors, the "old" middle class of artisans and traditional peasantry, was accompanied by the emergence of a strata of white collar employees. This new social group checked the proletar? ianization of European society and injected a new and vital social layer between corporate owners and wage laborers. Socialists, who viewed this "new" middle class as an extension of the working class, failed to take seriously specific political concerns. Consequently, rather than being integrated into the Social Democratic Party, the white collar middle class found itself ignored. Unable to establish a political alliance between blue and white collar workers, Social Democrats failed to create broad popular support for their program even as they allowed white collar workers to gravitate to anti parliamentary parties.15 They cautioned that the appearance of the new middle class was not a harbinger of social peace, a bridge between employers and employees. The war and the inflation of 1923 had "simplified" Germany's social structure and with the disappearance of the autocracy, German politics was up for grabs. To ignore the new middle class was to leave it prey to anti-democratic parties. Old theoretical perspectives which ignored these changes would inevitably fail. Lederer and Marschak declared that the success of the Weimar Republic depended on an effective response to the new situation.16 Although Social Democrats largely ignored Lederer's and Mar schak's plea, Hans Speier did not. Speier's study of white collar workers focused on the issue which he and his colleagues at the New School addressed throughout the 1930s: the meaning and origins of fascism and Nazism. Speier sought to determine the social foundations of German politics in the 1920s and 1930s. As a student of Karl Mannheim, he examined the role of ideas and their relation to social structure, as well as the appearance of the new middle class.17 Like Lederer and Marschak, Speier was a political intellectual who saw no conflict between his sympathy for social democracy and his responsi? bilities as a social scientist. Born in Berlin in 1905, Speier was the youngest person Alvin Johnson recruited to the Graduate Faculty. He had received his academic training in postwar Germany and was sensitive to the intellectual currents of Weimar in ways not shared by his older colleagues on the Graduate Faculty. He had studied with sociologist 31

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Karl Mannheim, philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Lederer.18 Like so many others of his generation Speier rejected the legacy of nineteenth century mechanistic Marxism. He was, above all, concerned with consciousness as a determining aspect of class.19 In defining the social and historical evolution of the salaried employee in Germany, Speier found himself confronting the related questions of empirical social description?defining the "new middle class" and accounting for its political behavior. His definition of class depended on reconciling Marxian and Weberian models so as to explain class consciousness not so much as a response to simple material conditions, but as a manifes? tation of the relative distribution of status in the context of the larger social order.20 He understood the new middle class as a class only in its own relationship to those classes from which it had emerged and against whose existence its consciousness derived.21 Even as he accepted Lederer's and Marschak's assertion of the importance of the "new middle class," he rejected their insistence that it was becoming increasingly homogeneous. Between 1931 and 1938 in Germany and the United States, Speier developed his ideas. Even before the Nazi's triumph in 1933 Speier saw the evolution of the new middle class as symptomatic of enormous social change in Germany itself. He hoped to explain these changes through an examination of this new class and thereby refine the ideas of "class."22 Speier saw the traumas of revolution, inflation, and depression as the immediate causes of Germany's transformation from a free market to a monopolistic capitalist order. Such changes entailed the destruction of the traditional social hierarchy, especially the disappearance of the proprietary middle class, and its replacement by salaried employees. Yet, the new middle class was not a single group as defined by conventional concepts of class. It also included dispos? sessed low-level bureaucratic functionaries, clerks, and relatively prosperous industrial workers. Due to the vicissitudes of Weimar's troubled economy, the new middle class found itself under constant attack. In the process, employees evolved a consciousness of themselves as a class.23 Speier argued that despite the diversity of these new groups they became aware of two fundamental truths. First, both Marxists and Liberals understood them as simply "bourgeois." Social Democrats ignored them as irrelevant, while the political liberals complacently viewed the new class as evidence that the working classes had assimilated bourgeois values. Second, Speier believed that these sala? ried employees experienced a deficit in what he called the distribution of social honors. Their consciousness of self-esteem suffered a signifi 32

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms cant loss from 1918 to 1933.24 Lacking social legitimacy, salaried employees came to see themselves in largely negative terms. Conse? quently, they were open to Nazi sloganeering. They adopted a gener? ally nationalist position as they identified their own grievances with those of the German nation. Speier denied that the affiliation of salaried employees with nationalist, and then Nazi, ideology was simply a rationalization of their perceived interests. Rather, he suggested that the German Right spoke to these interests in ways which the new middle class found difficult to resist.25 As a group whose social experience mirrored the tensions of the larger society, many of the new middle class came to believe that their wellbeing was threatened by outside forces. Their class-consciousness seemed to be a recognition of their own precarious ness, and, thus, of the general breakdown of social cohesion in Germany. For Speier, who believed that rapid economic growth had led to increased alienation, the appeal of Nazism was a consequence of social chaos. The "class" consciousness of the new middle class was itself a symptom of the breakdown of the larger social order. The Nazis simply exploited the vulnerabilities of this new class. Speier found a fundamental convergence of social and political interests between the new political Right and the new middle class. Describing Germany's social transformation as truly revolutionary, Speier characterized the reaction of salaried employees as a resistance to change.26 In a sense, the new middle class affirmed the values of the old middle class. Conscious of its own social tenuousness, the new middle class, like the National Socialists, responded to postwar changes by seeking to halt all change. Nazism spoke to the plight of a critical social strata which saw its own deterioration as symptomatic of Germany's stress. Speier emphasized the social disintegration which preceded the political coup de grace. He saw the Nazis as the climax of a series of historical events. The rapid social and economic transformation of Germany, with its prewar roots, was accelerated by the war, revolution, and depression. The social cohesion which had existed in the traditional middle class was shattered by economic growth, ignored by the proponents of democracy, and fed by the one political party which had no social theory?the National Socialists. Nazi success depended on the tensions inherent in the transformation from a traditional society to an urban, market-oriented, and largely secular nation. The social disintegration created human atoms, or a "mass' rather than class. In sum, Nazism was a movement of the "d?class?" and the "atomized" in society, many of whom came from the new middle class.

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This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms As Speier's work demonstrated the collapse of a traditional social structure, his theoretical suggestions were equally innovative. In seeking an alternative to a traditional Marxist concept of class based primarily on economic interests, Speier invoked the notion of status or honor.27 Not satisfied with the argument that honor or status had replaced economics, Speier argued that the ruling class set the standards by which honor was distributed. Moreover, status or honor, as a class-defining characteristic, could only be understood as it related to the society as a whole. Social values which derived from the values of the dominant social class determined relative social standing on the basis of cultural, rather than economic or material considera? tions. Moreover, Speier insisted that "the social stratification of the present can never be fully explained without reference to the past." Class was a cultural phenomenon which could only be understood in its spatial (social) and temporal (historic) relationships. The meaning of social class regained a sense of its relationship to a whole, or a gestalt, whose dimensions were defined by time and space. Ideas by them? selves could not be interpreted as justification of economic or class function when class was itself defined by its relationship to dominant cultural values. The cultural basis of ideas, in Speier's conception, meant that ideas were more than responses or functions, they defined the social structure itself. In his work Speier had accomplished several objects. He had challenged the proposition of "scientific" Marxism, evoked a notion of mass or atomized society, and provided the basis for a broader historical interpretation of fascism. Weimar democracy had collapsed, he argued, because it had not recognized the changes in German society. The ease with which the Republic had succumbed to Nazism suggested, to Speier, a congenital defect in parliamentary democracy itself. Fascism, for Speier, was a consequence of the "elitism" of the masses, of the worst features of democracy gone awry. By the early 1940s, Speier interpreted Nazism as complete or "totalitarian," repres? sion, in which the state by virtue of a monopoly over politics, communi? cation, and culture, exercised total control. Hitler's promise of a society free of class and racial conflict seemed a perverted realization of Speier's own dream of social democracy. In the years immediately preceding his death in 1939, Lederer, too, addressed the relationship between fascism and his earlier work on the new middle class. Collaborating closely with Speier, who edited his work posthumously, Lederer's last book evoked, for the first time, a concept of totalitarianism. Published in 1939, in The State of the Masses,28 Lederer identified the breakdown of social class as a critical

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This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms feature in the emergence of fascism. Drawing on Speier's work, Lederer analyzed the social basis and theoretical implications of fascism?Italian and German. Incorporating ideas from Freud's crowd psychology, Lederer argued that social groups and crowds were not identical entities.29 Society limited and controlled individual's non national, more passionate side. Social groups were united by an ideology of interests, and their composition was homogeneous.30 Politi? cal groups, however, attempted to speak to larger interests, which cut across class lines, in an effort to transcend social distinction in an appeal to unity. As long as social differences existed, according to Lederer, politics would be rational, balanced, and ordered. In contrast, the breakdown of class and its replacement by crowds created a mass of undifferentiated human atoms whose actions were governed not by reason but by emotion, creating communities which lacked class concerns and identity. Drawing on Weber's notion of charisma as a temporary link between traditional and modern systems of authority, Lederer noted that crowds or masses have had only temporary existences. Education, social standards, and customs all worked towards eliminating mass or crowd behavior.31 Historically, revolu? tions had always given way to order. Lederer considered mass politics to be, by definition, irrational. Mass politics depended on the breakdown of social classes creating a mass of atomized, irrational persons whom charismatic leaders sought to mold into homogeneous communities. Fascism, Lederer believed, depended on the unfortunate confluence of social dissolution with the advent of political democracy. The entry of the masses into the politics which coincided with the rapid postwar changes in German and Italian society enabled fascists to metamorphize temporary crowds into permanent fascist parties. The transformation, from a society of discrete classes to a revolutionary classless society based on race or folk, was fascism's identifying feature.32 The capture of "mass" society by fascists and their subsequent destruction of the traditional state was accompanied by pseudo-socialist methods. Fascist states practiced economic interventionism, not to transform the working class, but to subdue it by appealing to "barest envy."33 As a consequence, Lederer warned, we must revise our social theory. Socialism at one time prophesied class conflict and promised a classless utopia. Fascism borrowed both the means and ends of socialism but in the name of slavery, not freedom. To Lederer the implications were ominous. Not only was the Marxist prophecy dubious, its fulfillment spelled disaster. The absence of social classes, and hence social conflict, meant the end of 35

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms human liberty. "The social classes," he said, "are the main productive agents [of creativity] and their influence is decisive."34 "Social struggle is the great agent of life and what we might term progress."35 If fascism and classless utopia were identical, then the character of socialism itself had to be transformed. To avoid the tyranny of fascism, socialism had to adopt many of the values of classical liberalism. Socialism had to foster individualism, accept class differences, and abandon the ideal of community or a homogeneous mass. The differ? ence between "socialism" and "liberalism," argued Lederer, was not that socialists did not care about individual freedom, but that they believed that collective action was the best means to secure freedom. In a democratic society, Lederer argued, the transformation from capi? talism to socialism would come about through the economic interven? tion of a benign state acting in the interests of the working and middle classes.36 Fascism had destroyed social classes and with them the individual; socialism conserved social classes and with them freedom. When he had first come to the United States in 1934, Lederer had viewed "liberalism" and "socialism" as fundamentally different politi? cal positions. By 1939 the differences no longer seemed significant. In fact, Lederer believed that fascism as a classless, communitarian ideology resembled if not communism, then Stalinism. By liberalizing socialist ideals, Lederer was able to identify the "essence" of fascism as anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-democratic. Hans Staudinger, born in 1889 into an intellectual, Protestant family, had met Emil Lederer in 1911 or 1912 when both were students at Heidelberg. Together they studied economics and enrolled in a secret socialist society. In 1933 Lederer recommended Staudinger for a position at the New School. At the time, Staudinger was in prison undergoing a series of interviews by the Gestapo intended to persuade him to join the Nazis. Staudinger had attracted the attention of the Nazis because of his impressive record in the federal and state bureaucracy. First, as the personal adjutant of the Reichsminister of Economics, and subsequently as a state secretary in Prussia, Staudin? ger had gained a national reputation as an efficient and successful civil servant. His ability in combining a bureaucratic career with socialist political activity testified to his political adroitness and personal charm. He was, in his own words, "a scientist operating in the political theater."37 Staudinger's father, Franz Staudinger, was a philosopher, economist, teacher, and "ethical" socialist who knew personally both August Bebel and T?nnies. Staudinger's own thought owed much to T?nnies work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. His lifelong belief in a socialist community was an intellectual and emotional commitment to 36

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms T?nnies' ideal. At ninety, Staudinger still insisted, "I was always a socialist, one of the few who has the ideal of men living together in harmony, the best was possible, a real community."38 As a young intellectual, from his earliest days at Heidelberg, Staudinger had taken an active part in the debate over the "social question." He had concluded that the "scientific" Marxist prediction of the "withering away of the state" was a false prophecy. At the same time, he clung to a belief that the working class might create its own community as a result of its cultural autonomy and creativity. At Heidelberg, in his doctoral thesis, "The Individual and Community," Staudinger worked out the ideas that shaped the remainder of his life.39 Demonstrating, through an analysis of the history of musical societies, the progressive disintegration and then re-creation of a cultural community, Staudinger offered the optimistic prospect that the working class contained the seeds of a new community. The original artisan community, which dated back to the Middle Ages, had been destroyed by the factory system and the market economy that had replaced collective concern with individual greed. Contemporary evidence, Staudinger suggested, indicated that the working class had begun to reject "artificial," "bourgeois," and "mechanical" social rela? tionships of the market place in favor of organic, communal ones. When T?nnies revised his classic work in 1912, he cited Staudin? ger's study as evidence that the materialistic-bourgeois dominance of cultural had ended. Staudinger's work, directed by Alfred Weber and influenced significantly by his brother, Max Weber, bore the influen? ces of Germany's great social theorists. While Max Weber worked out the typologies of historical development, his thought was influenced by T?nnies' distinction between community and society, traditional and modern. Each of them identified embourgeoisement rather than the dialectic of class struggle as the means by which European society had become rational, materialistic, and mechanical, in a word "modern." Weber formulated a theory of historical change which evolutionary socialists like T?nnies and Staudinger could accept without reference to the "mechanics" of Marxism.40 Staudinger believed that the emergence of working-class musical societies indicated what the masses, when liberated, might truly create. His analysis rested on his understanding of the liberating and creative possibility of leisure time, itself the consequence of economic transformation. Staudinger considered the modern, "rational" world, which Weber had found ambiguous, both positive and necessary. The individualism which informed capitalism had, paradoxically, created a structurally collectivized society which would in turn give rise to a 37

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms communitarian culture that repudiated the excessive individualism of bourgeois capitalism. As a result, Staudinger predicted that the working class would emerge with a renewed sense of its collectivity. Revolution no longer seemed necessary for a socialist transformation. In Weber and T?nnies, in change and community, Staudinger had found the historical and theoretical prospectives for his social-demo? cratic commitments. During World War I Staudinger was wounded and twice decor? ated. Following the armistice, he received an appointment as Geheim? rat in the Weimar Ministry of Economics. An active Social Democrat, he nevertheless retained his position in the federal bureaucracy until 1927. In these years Staudinger supported the policies of Walter Ratheneau. Rather than socialize the means of production, Staudinger, with Ratheneau, and his longtime friend, economist Adolph Lowe, argued that a socialist economy, a gemeinwirtschaft, could be built within the existing economic structures. Instead of taking over basic industries, the state, through economic planning and resource alloca? tion, should act as a public entrepreneur. Given the increasingly sharp split between the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party, the adoption of a glanwirtschaft or the state-as-entrepreneur policy seemed a viable yet socialist alternative. Staudinger, Lowe, and Ratheneau held that socialism was essential to redress of the economic imbalance of capitalism. The state assumed responsibility for economic growth and social equality without destroying the market economy. They endorsed economic planning and regulation rather than public owner? ship.41 By 1927, Staudinger found his Social Democratic affiliations had become a liability in Weimar's increasingly conservative political alignment. Resigning from the federal government, Staudinger secured a state secretaryship in the Social Democratic Prussian state government of Otto Braun. Attached to the Ministry of Trade and Commerce, Staudinger coordinated the energy industry of the state. He consolidated electrical companies, reduced prices, spurred rural electrification, and nationalized the production of potash, iron ore, and coal along with electricity. In 1931 he and several colleagues protested the Brunning government's deflationary policies. Instead, they called for a wide-ranging program of reform. Although the German govern? ment did not adopt these proposals, the Prussian state government, under Staudinger's guidance, followed what Staudinger believed was an essentially Keynesian economic path in 1931 and 1932.42 To stimu? late consumption and reduce unemployment, Staudinger and his colleagues in the Prussian bureaucracy used profits from state indus 38

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms try to finance public works programs which, in turn, provided employ? ment and income for the unemployed. In July, 1932, Weimar Prime Minister Franz von Papen ended Braun's efforts in Prussia to trans? form private cartels into state enterprises as he dissolved the Prussian government. Subsequent economic studies have substantiated Stau? dinger's later claim that the policies of glanwirtschaft had stimulated economic recovery prior to von Papen's action.43 Arnold Brecht, Staudinger's colleague in the Braun government and later at the New School, successfully challenged Papen's "coup" before the German Supreme Court. Staudinger, however, resigned from the government and declared his candidacy for the Reichstag as a Social Democrat from Hamburg. Staudinger, as a Social Democrat, embraced the general slogan of the party, "Hitler means war," as he won a seat in the Reichstag. Almost overnight he moved from the confines of the Prussian ministry into the hectic and violent world of German politics. His adherence to the program of continued and, if necessary, clandestine Socialist activity gained his reelection in November and brought the enmity of the opposition Nazi and Communist Parties. He recalled narrowly escaping, in early 1933, an assassination attempt by so-called Commu? nist squads who one evening waited for him to cross the Elbe by ferry.44 What the Communists failed to accomplish, the Nazis almost achieved. Within weeks of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, and as a result of his defiance of the ban on political activity, the Nazis arrested Staudinger in April 1933 at a meeting of his illegal, underground Socialist group. At the time, he had been entrusted with more than a million marks which he had raised from the Berlin banker Otto Jeidels, possibly representing the Centralverein, a German-Jewish organization. Jeidels had given Staudinger the money specifically for the Socialist Party to expose the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists.45 Staudinger later recalled that he seemed almost alone in inter? preting Nazi political doctrine as embodying the ideological pro? nouncements contained in Mein Kampf His Socialist colleagues, like Rudolph Hilferding, regarded the book as "monstrous drivel" and could not bring themseles to read it, while Jewish friends, especially anti-Zionists, refused his appeal for an anti-Nazi, anti-racist fund in the Socialist Party. Staudinger, along with Carlo Mierendorff, had served as the leader of the Young Socialists. Of the thirty-six persons in their clandestine group, all but one were arrested in 1933 by the Reich police. Of those captured, only Staudinger was charged with treason and threatened with hanging. After six weeks of intermittent 39

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms beatings, solitary confinement, and secret messages to his lawyer and to his wife, Staudinger found out that his million marks were safe and that he would soon be released. As a result of his wife's efforts the King of Belgium intervened on his behalf. In June 1933, the Nazi govern? ment permitted him to leave on the condition that he never appear again in Hamburg and that he report back in September.46 "You have to know Hitler. I knew him. I hated him. Yet he was powerful."47 Thus, in a 1978 interview, Hans Staudinger explained the origins and nature of his political enemy. In 1938 Staudinger worked with Alvin Johnson and one of his assistants, Weber Pese, on a translation of Mein Kampf. Two years later he published an analysis of the economy of the Third Reich, "The Future of Totalitarian Barter Trade Economy," in Social Research.48 In 1941, again assisted by Pese, Staudinger wrote The Inner Nazi, in which he identified the relation? ship between Nazi ideology and Hitler's wartime strategy. Only recently discovered and published, The Inner Nazi represents Staudin? ger's vision and understanding of fascism, an account which comple? mented and enlarged the ideas of Lederer and Speier. Staudinger's ideas were shaped by his realization that the "crack? pot" and his "motley gang" meant to accomplish exactly what they had intended. The Nazis were neither opportunists nor ad hoc radicals. Rather, starting with Hitler, they took the racist ideology of Mein Kampf seriously and meant to fulfill its ideological goals. Staudinger was surprised neither by the outbreak of war in 1939, the Russian invasion of 1941, nor the policy of genocide. The "Final Solution" was the logical conclusion to the ideas in Mein Kampf. Finally, Staudin? ger's appreciation of the extent to which Nazi ideology successfully permeated German society forced him to conclude that Nazism was also a German problem. The Inner Nazi was an interpretation of Hitler's political power by a contemporary observer. In contrast to Franz Neumann's 1944 classic study, Behemoth, Staudinger argued that Hitler's ideology, far more powerfully than German society, determined the evolution of the Nazi state.49 At the same time, he acknowledged that Nazi economic policy merely extended the neo-mercantilist practices which he and other state planners had developed between 1923 and 1933. Staudinger admitted that the "state as entrepreneur," both before and after 1933, had opened the way for economic and then political domination.50 Using strategies of price fixing and production allocations to shift output from consumer goods to heavy armaments, the Nazis created a European economic Gleichschaltung which made possible political hegemony. Ideological in purpose, Nazi economic policy, insisted 40

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Staudinger, was neither profitable in economic terms, nor rational in Weberian terms. Indeed, it undercut the political and economic power of capitalist-industrialists as a class. Staudinger used Weber's theory of "rationalization" to explain Nazi political success in Germany. By emphasizing the continuity of economic behavior before and after 1933, Staudinger rejected notions of the evolution of capitalist structures in twentieth-century Germany. The state in Weimar and the party-state in the Third Reich planned and executed interventionist economic policies for their own, though quite different, political ends. Between 1920 and 1945 political ideol? ogy, translated into political power not into market or class forces, transformed German society. Together, Weimar and Nazi policies destroyed the traditional social order in Germany and created an egalitarian state. Staudinger also challenged Neumann's concept of working-class isolation and political immunity from the capitalist producer as well as from the Nazi state and its ideology. Instead, Staudinger suggested that Nazi ideology had become an integral part of German culture affecting all strata of society. The working class, especially after 1927, had been left unsupported by the Socialists or the trade unions. These failures, attributable to an intra-class political schism, meant that Socialism failed to gain working-class adherence to the ideals and policies of state planning. While the Socialists failed to win the support of the working class, the Nazis succeeded. Staudinger offered a kind of Newtonian physics of social ideologies. What German Socialists failed to accomplish or to provide for the working class, National Socialists promised and, to some extent, provided. In the context of the depres? sion, the Nazis found the working class susceptible to their ideological themes. Staudinger established the crucial role of racist ideology, identi? fied the state as the monopolistic entrepreneur engaged in economic and political domination, and established the intimate relationship between Nazi theory and practice. Most importantly, however, Stau? dinger believed that Nazism and fascism were attempts to recreate a community: in his terms, a racial community whose hatred and power were the absolute antithesis of the socialist community which he had hoped would replace bourgeois capitalism. In 1933 Staudinger con? fronted the contradictions of his own commitments. As a young man he had embraced the idea of a democratic, socialist community; as a political refugee he discovered that the Nazis had utilized socialist means and rhetoric to pervert the dream of human community into a racist nightmare.

41

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Staudinger submitted his manuscript to Alvin Johnson for publi? cation in Social Research. After reading the manuscript, Johnson reported that he had become "magnetized" by the manuscript and was ready to devote the entire next issue of Social Research to its publica? tion. Staudinger was pleased yet puzzled?pleased at Johnson's enthu? siasm, puzzled at the "magnetic" appeal which Johnson had described. Johnson tried to explain that while he understood Staudinger's concep? tion of Hitler and the Nazis as truly evil, he also felt strangely drawn to the power of the appeal itself. He was not flirting with a Nazi mentality, but for the first time he understood the incredible strength of the movement. Staudinger remembered his shock. Johnson was hardly a naive man. But "the Nazis were our enemy. We hated them. It could not be permitted that my book might somehow gain that enemy admiration." If Johnson could grant those enemies their power, how might the larger public react? Staudinger recalled that Johnson had insisted that the manuscript be published in Social Research, even while Staudinger came to believe that publication was impossible. Finally, Staudinger took the manuscript home and placed it on a shelf where it remained for thirty-five years.51 Briefly in the mid-1940s and permanently in the 1950s, Hans Staudinger succeeded Emil Lederer as the Dean of the Graduate Faculty. After Lederer's death, the Graduate Faculty looked to Stau? dinger for personal guidance. Staudinger's personality was forceful and yet generous. Few could withstand his charm. Often, his close friends were also his academic rivals, and they felt the sting of his humor and opposition. Max Ascoli, later editor of the Reporter, was a gifted journalist and dapper dresser. Regularly, Staudinger, in the heat of argument, would twist the buttons off Ascoli's suit jacket and, as he made his points, drop the buttons loudly into one of the dozen ashtrays on Ascoli's desk.52 Ascoli forgave Staudinger's indiscretions because they shared an intense emotional and intellectual obsession with fascism which had not only driven them into exile, but had destroyed their vision of a democratic Europe. Unlike Staudinger, who considered himself a socialist, Ascoli had always called himself a political liberal. He harbored few illusions about the possibility of an egalitarian community, nor did he think one desirable. Despite his misgivings concerning the democratization of western society, Ascoli, like his colleagues, accepted the change as irresistible and irreversible. There was no going back to some mytho? logical, pre-modern golden age. He defined his task as finding a means to check the tyrannical tendencies within democratic society without destroying popularly based government. "Fascism was the product of 42

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms democratic decay," wrote Ascoli in 1938, "a parasitic growth on the democratic structure."53 It was as revolutionary in its means as it was conservative in its goals. In 1933 Ascoli joined the University in Exile as a charter member. Like his German colleagues, he had encountered fascism firsthand. Indeed, his acquaintance with the Italian version gave him an even longer experience with fascist political development. Born in 1898, Ascoli was an Italian Jew graced by both learning and prosperity. Trained in the philosophy of law, he had studied both literature and philosophy, the latter with Italy's great intellectual, Benedetto Croce. Like Weber, Croce had been concerned with elaborating the difference between natural and human sciences, in understanding the process of history apart from the mechanistic determinism of nineteenth century positivism, and in affirming the progress of human society. Croce's "idealism" led him to historical study as the source of meaning and values. He was less interested in discovering ethical norms than in finding historical confirmation for his belief in human freedom. Convinced that the search for transcendent values had been "eclipsed by the discovery of historical consciousness," Croce argued that human freedom was embodied in historical change.54 As the dominant Italian intellectual of his day, Croce offered a philosophical means by which to break free from the determinisms of nineteenth-century positivism and Marxism. His alternative, in the face of Mussolini's accession to power, seemed to offer only intellectual quietism as the antidote to political engagement. Croce's silence in the wake of the Mattoetti Affair of 1926 earned him Mussolini's tolerance and Ascoli's con? tempt.55 Trained in the tradition of Crocean liberalism, Ascoli saw the evolution of Italian Fascism through his mentor's eyes, but not uncritically. Along with his Italian colleague at the New School, Gaetano Salvemini, Ascoli described the emergence of Italian Fascism in three steps: first, the march on Rome; second, the Mattoetti Affair; and third, the elimination of the intellectuals as a dominant voice in the political culture. The last stage, accomplished in 1928 when Mussolini forced university professors to sign an oath of loyalty to the regime and the Duce, revealed the full extent of Mussolini's control. On April 30,1928, Mussolini placed Ascoli, one of eighteen professors who refused to renounce their opposition, under "protective custody" pend? ing his exile.56 Ascoli's anti-fascism was guided by a deep loyalty to what he called "rational" politics. Ascoli interpreted fascism as the triumph of irrationality in conjunction with mass democracy. Mussolini's assumption of total 43

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms political power by 1928 was the consequence of the failure of Italian political parties to recognize the emergence of new social groups. Ascoli considered the "rise of the masses" as much a political as an economic phenomenon, which political leaders did not adequately respond to. Political parties, led in part by intellectuals, failed to familiarize their new constituents with the process of parliamentary democracy. Thus, Italy had the forms of parliamentary democracy, but did not integrate its "essential" spirit of freedom. This created a political vacuum. Into this gap, between state and society, strode Mussolini and his Black Shirts. To insure its own survival, Mussolini eliminated his most important rival, the democratic state. In sum, wrote Ascoli, fascism was a "political technocracy: by eliminating democratic restraints, and scorning democratic ideals, the instru? ments of modern democracy could be made to perform revolutionary work."57 Fascism assumed total control of the political, administrative, and economic spheres of the liberal-democratic society it replaced. The Fascist Party monopolized power in Italy as it terminated all constitu? tional political activity. By transcending constitutional forms the fascist state became revolutionary. Its revolutionary nature, in turn, created a new individual, declared Ascoli, who was "a close relative of the large masses.. .he has no conscience, he is human energy without humanity, just as fascism is democracy without freedom."58 Max Ascoli described fascism as an assault on the state apparatus by the unpolitical. While the German National Socialists emphasized the collapse of a social order to justify their imposition of a fascist political order, Ascoli suggesteds the reverse had occurred in Italy. The failure of political parties, created a vacuum which Mussolini quickly filled. The responsibility for that breakdown?manifest in the inability of liberal society to defend itself or respond to the emergence of new social classes?was itself the consequence of an intellectual failure. Croce had taught his generation, argued Ascoli, to appreciate beauty and human creativity. He had neglected, however, to teach Italians to distinguish right from wrong.59 As a consequence, intellec? tuals lacked a moral basis on which to make the political judgments necessary to defend democratic institutions. Fascism, argued Ascoli, exploited the intellectuals' apathy towards politics. If fascism was inevitable, it was so because Italian intellectuals had fatalistically believed that all history was determined. Croce's idealism, while attacking mechanistic positivism, offered no useful answers to Italy's political tragedy. Rejecting the distinction that Croce maintained between ideas and matter, values and politics, Ascoli declared that intellectuals had to reclaim their rightful political place. They had to 44

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms provide the intellectual leadership necessary to create a liberalized democracy, which respected both individual rights and constitutional limitations.60 Ascoli believed that the collapse of traditional politics had made fascism possible. Political stability, reason, and intellectual responsi? bility were necessary if democracy were to avoid the pitfall of fascism. Only morally committed intellectuals could prevent the democratic masses from abusing the enormous power of the modern state. Democracy needed the commitment and leadership of its intellectuals. The public needed the guidance of an intelligent elite. Ascoli blamed fascism on a generation of intellectual idealists whose historical "relativism" confused, rather than educated, the public. He resisted the temptation to invoke either Christian or natural rights arguments as the basis of political authority. Rather, he rested his plea for political ethics on two assumptions: the essential reasonableness of humanity and its ability to be educated.61 Intellectuals should think seriously about politics and be willing to act on their convictions. The distinction between science and politics, which had immobilized Croce, no longer seemed tenable. In response to what he considered the defects of Crocean intellec tualism, Ascoli defended liberal democracy through his writing and action. He and his colleagues at the New School argued that their exile was itself a political act. But Ascoli wanted to extend those commit? ments. He and Hans Speier played active roles as political intellectuals after the United States' entry into the war. Ascoli transformed the Graduate Faculty's research efforts into a quasi-governmental research organization, the Institute for World Affairs. In 1949, Ascoli resigned from the Graduate Faculty to devote his energy to publishing a political journal, the Reporter. In the 1950s the Reporter became, along with the New Republic, an outspoken advocate of American anti Communism. For Ascoli, the tensions of contemporary politics caused by the rise of mass participation, could only be resolved by an affirmation of traditional liberal values. Unrestricted democracy could only become totalitarian. American society, represented for him, the bastion of western liberty, and as such, it had to be defended at all cost.62 Like Ascoli, Frieda Wunderlich was also preoccupied by the problem of political responsibility. But the Weimar experience did not shake her belief in the intrinsic worth and morality of parliamentary democracy. Much as Ascoli, she believed that democratization had opened the door to fascist success. But for Wunderlich, it was less a consequence of a defect of democracy than a failure of public policy. 45

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Socialists in Germany, she argued, had become victims of their own ideology. Born in 1889, in Berlin, Wunderlich was a prominent expert on social policy. A teacher at the Vocational Institute in Berlin, she also edited Soziale Praxis and served as a representative to the Berlin City Council, a member of the Prussian State Parliament, and as a judge on the Prussian Supreme Court of Social Welfare. She special? ized in social welfare policy and social history. As a social historian she wrote on labor, women, and the impact of unemployment insurance. Like Lederer and Speier, Wunderlich examined the structural and political tensions which had permitted the National Socialists to come to power. At the New School, with Ascoli and economist Eduard Heiman, Wunderlich taught a course on "Bolshevism, Socialism, and Fascism." She died in 1965 in New York.63 Unlike Ascoli, Wunderlich was not concerned with sweeping theoretical statements but rather chose to examine the specific impact of Weimar social policy in order to determine the particular causes of its failure. At the New School, Wunderlich gradually abandoned some of her non-theoretical presup? positions as she adopted Lederer's and Speier's totalitarian model. But like Ascoli, she had never identified with the utopianism of the Social Democrats. Wunderlich cared most about finding the means to ameliorate the social problems of her day. Her concern over the conditions of working people, women, children, poverty, alcoholism, and prostitution manif? ested itself in the public responsibilities she assumed. In contrast to Staudinger's confidence that an "organized economy" would solve economic inequities, Wunderlich looked to the political process itself. The state had an obligation to intervene in behalf of the socially disadvantaged. But to be effective it had to do so with care and discrimination. She was less concerned with large social schemes than appropriate policies to meet specific problems. Wunderlich was not attracted to political parties or ideologies.64 She believed that social progress could only be achieved through gradual and deliberate changes sanctioned by the public as a whole. A parliamentary demo? crat but not a Social Democrat, Wunderlich understood social science and social policy as instruments of public compassion and justice.65 She wished to find a non-ideological alternative to both state socialism and free market liberalism.66 Educated in philosophy, political science, and economics, she was, of all the European ?migr?es, perhaps closest to the "progressivism" of the founders of the New School. Forced to relinquish her public responsibilities, Wunderlich, as an exile, resumed her scholarly studies. She asked: How did Weimar Germany, with its glorious declaration, in 1918, of guaranteed political 46

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms and social democracy, pave the way for Nazism? Why did the Republic fail? Like Lederer and Speier, Wunderlich believed that the answer lay in the social changes which had occurred between 1905 and 1929. An older Germany had disappeared and a new one replaced it. The new Germany was dominated by a salaried middle class, emancipated women, and factory laborers. Yet, Wunderluch argued, Weimar society was also dominated by a "materialistic" philosophy, replete with contradictions and misunderstandings and was fully as bureau? cratic as imperial Germany. The Weimar policy of increased social insurance, which created social guarantees to prevent the pauperiza? tion of the working classes, also created an army of permanently unemployed. The government had intended these social security adjustments to provide short-term relief for the able-bodied during lulls in the business cycles and permanent relief only for the truly disabled. Such policies had not anticipated the massive economic stagnation which pervaded the 1918-1930 era.67 Socialist policy, Wun? derlich argued, had thereby prevented the revolutionary situation which Marxists predicted. The long-range effect of these bureaucratic measures nevertheless proved disastrous.68 Wunderlich criticized the manner in which the Weimar social welfare system had been administered. Rather than democratize the system by transferring control to popularly controlled neighborhood and community councils, Weimar simply took over the prewar govern? mental bureaucracies. The welfare system showed little concern for the individual. Instead, it dealt with the destitute as abstract social problems under such headings as "unemployment," "alcoholism," and "prostitution." The depression of 1932 overwhelmed the system as it was completely unable to provide even minimal relief. Having failed to establish any rapport or public trust, the welfare system came to be seen, by those it served, as insensitive and bureaucratic. Rather than win public support for the government, the welfare system had alienated its own constituents. "In 1932," wrote Wunderlich, "there was nothing left of the proud ideals of 1918."69 She suggested that Nazi rhetoric provided Germany's unem? ployed psychic compensation. Left adrift by the economy, individuals compensated for their damaged self-esteem through vicarious identifi? cation with national greatness. "The heroic ideals of a non-bourgeois life were combined with a longing to be protected within the group, to be obedient and submissive to the new community."70 In identifying Nazism as a search for a new community that was both racial and anti Semitic, Wunderlich focused less on the working class than on Ger? many's middle classes. She argued that the most serious mistake of 47

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Weimar Socialists was not their failure to respond to the "new" middle class of salaried employees, but that Weimar policy had almost completely ignored the old middle class of independent trades people, farmers, and small property owners who suffered the greatest losses due to the structural changes in the economy. Threatened by proletar? ianization, their impoverishment made them easy prey for radical politicians. "The shattering of bourgeois life," declared Wunderlich, "shook the German people like an earthquake."71 This had occurred not simply because of rapid economic expansion but because the Social Democratic Party had been caught in its own contradictions. The remnants of the old propertied middle classes, those most attached to values of hard work and individual status, formed the backbone of the Nazi party. "Too late the Socialists realized," wrote Wunderlich, "that they had neglected to win the group which according to Marxist philosophy should have disintegrated and turned socialist, but did not."72 Political failure and ideological blindness resulted in policies that created the conditions in which Nazism flourished. But Wunder? lich saw a deeper and more troubling problem. Nazism was also a counterrevolution. As a scholar, Wunderlich was one of the first social scientists to give serious attention to the role and status of women in industrial economies. She observed that after a hundred years of struggle for equal rights and cultural emancipation, in Nazi Germany, women found themselves restored to the traditional position of guardian of children, church, and kitchen. Their earlier efforts to achieve equality had been accelerated by the wartime mobilization during which women had made unprecedented gains in employment. Yet, in the 1920s as the economy faltered and the government relied on public works to stimulate the economy, employers and unions forced women out of factories and salaried positions to provide jobs for men. The situation became even worse, after 1933, as National Socialists ideal? ized the patriarchal notion of women as wives and mothers.73 In this manner, National Socialism extended the worst defects of the Repub? lic's failures and made these failures integral features of the Third Reich. Wunderlich described this as a "revolution," an overturning of values. Nazism, in its appeal to the old middle class, created a society which embodied the traditional patriarchal ideals of its most ardent supporters.74 Nazism raised to a norm what Weimar policy makers had considered social problems and had tried unsuccessfully to amelio? rate. Wunderlich argued that Weimar's mixed economy, combining state and private ownership, provided an ideal setting for such an 48

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms occurrence. Weimar's combintion of a strong and entrenched bureau? cracy but a relatively weak parliamentary tradition produced a state socialism that was easily perverted.75 Nazism built on the edifice of democracy and socialism to create a totalitarian state as it crushed the parliamentary democracy which had preceded it. The Republic had used socialism in the name of freedom; National socialism used it for the sake of a totalitarian state whose aim was the suppression of freedom. Forced to choose between equality and liberty, Wunderlich chose liberty. In her words, "Nazism reveals, just as Russian Bolshe? vism, that socialism has no value in itself. Such values as it may have derive solely from the ethical ideal with which it is connected."76 Nazi ideology transformed Weimar egalitarianism into a "totalitarian" state as it eliminated all individual autonomy and liberty. Its equality, she argued, was, finally, the "equality of slavery." One of the most interesting manifestations of Hitler's politicaliza tion of these Europeans' thought was Max Wertheimer's effort to apply Gestalt theory to political and ethical issues. As a psychologist and philosopher, Wertheimer, in his seminar on the methodology of the social sciences, complemented the work of the General Seminar as the entire Graduate Faculty from 1933 to 1943 participated in it. Wertheimer was one of the Graduate Faculty's great creative teaching talents and authentic characters. Yet, Wertheimer's 1924 "Manifesto," on Gestalt psychology was not translated until 1943. Moreover, his only book Productive Thinking was published two years after his death, through the efforts of Clara Mayer. In Productive Thinking, Werthei? mer examined the philosophical implications of Gestalt psychology as he related the mind to experience and the individual to society and nature. Productive Thinking almost assumed the form of a scientific poem to the principles of Gestalt or wholeness. Trained as an experi? mental psychologist, throughout his life Wertheimer sought to tran? scend the limits of his training without abandoning his belief in the validity of empirical verification. Influenced by the rationalism of Kant and Spinoza, he tried to create an empirically verifiable alterna? tive to what he called "associationist" psychology. As a young student of philosophy and psychology, between 1908 and 1910, Wertheimer studied the music and culture of the so-called "primitive mind."77 After studying the music of a Ceylonese tribe, Wertheimer con? cluded that it manifested a set of rules, a structure, which made it clear and precise. This suggested the possible existence of a universal form of musical creation. Wertheimer followed up his inquiry when, two years later, he wrote on the systems of thought exhibited by a 49

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms number of different tribes. He discovered that, as in the case of music, "primitive" thought followed certain formal rules. In thinking about quantities, the tribes tended to conceptualize whole forms which determined the meaning of the constituent parts. Wertheimer believed that primitive peoples revealed what he later called a Gestalt orienta? tion, a cognitive mode of perception. He concluded that "primitive" thinking was not formally different from "advanced." Rather, all thinking involved an ordering of experience. The logical structure of primitive thought was hidden to modern scholars due to their own reliance on largely analytical modes of thought. Wertheimer followed up this early work in 1912 in a different, but related, study of apparent movement or as it has been called the "phi phenomenon."78 With close collaborators Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang K?hler, Wertheimer explained the "illusion" of apparent or "strobos copic" movement occurred when two stationary objects placed close to one another were presented in rapid succession. As K?hler recalled, under these conditions, "an observer does not see two objects appearing in quick succession at their two places, rather he sees one object moving rapidly from the first to the second place."79 At the time, many psychologists considered this an optical illusion and dismissed the phenomenon. They argued that each line or fact was independent of the other, and that "perceptual facts consist of [such] independent local sensations."80 It had significance as an illusion, but was not susceptible to scientific analysis. For Wertheimer and his colleagues the question of stroboscopic movement was valid. How and why was it perceived as such? And can knowledge of it have any scientific standing? To explain such apparent motion they believed that they needed a different theory of psychology. In the words of Gestalt psychologist and historian, Mary Henle, "Psychology was, in 1910, characteristically analytical; in naive imita? tion of the natural sciences it attempted to reduce very complex phenomenon to simpler ones... "81 Echoing the increasing unhappiness with positivists, and perhaps ignorant of James' contemporary work in holistic perceptions, Gestaltists adopted an embattled position. They argued that psychology, in general, understood perceptual phenomena atomistically, operating according to laws derived from Newtonian mechanics. Specifically, in the area of perception, or in what psycholo? gists called perceptual organizations, the composite of the thing perceived was taken to be a sum of the constituent parts, and the perception of the composite was deemed to be a consequence of past experience. This mechanistic empiricism, Wertheimer and his col? leagues argued, became the basis of a behavioral psychology in which 50

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms human actions were explained as analogous to non-cultural organi? sing. By the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of Willhelm Wundt, the postulates of English empiricism had become thoroughly "entrenched" in German academic psychology as Wundt's laboratory, in Leipzig became the center of central European psychol? ogy. Drawing on the doctrines of Locke and Hume, Wundt's empiri? cism stressed the role of sensate experience in the creation of knowl? edge.82 Two ideas led Wertheimer to question the validity of such an "empiricist" psychology: Ernst Mach's work in theoretical physics and field theory and psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels' paper "On Gestalt Qualities." Mach suggested that while particles were impor? tant physical phenomena, they were nevertheless part of a larger field, or whole, whose property had to be understood as something other than the sum of the phenomena contained therein. Von Ehrenfels took Mach's insight a step further by identifying form, or Gestalt, as a quality which presented itself to the mind distinct from sensation. Gestalt qualities could remain the same even when their sensate components were altered. Ehrenfels' famous illustration of a melody remains the most effective illustration of this insight. Ordered in a fixed relationship, six tones remain the same, and are recognized as such, even when the key is changed. What remains is the relationship, and it is the relationship which is the melody. A tune is recognized, not as a consequence of the sum of its sounds, but because of its formal, or as Ehrenfels called it, Gestalt qualities.83 Influenced by Mach's and Ehrenfels' work, Wertheimer and his collaborators, Koffka and K?hler, concluded that the strobeoscopic movement which they observed was due to the relationship, within the field of perception between the opening of the lines and the intervals of time used in making those lines. In other words, observers had perceived motion because of a system, a series of spatial and temporal relationships, whose qualities were whole. The "illusion" was a normal perception and could be understood if psychologists abandoned associ ationist theories which stressed specific data without regard to struc? tural relationships.84 Koffka and K?hler spent the rest of their careers working out the scientific basis of Gestalt psychology. Each came to the United States, Koffka in the late 1920s and Kohler in 1935, and each taught for a time at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. K?hler developed the hypothesis of isomorphism, a principle inherent in Wertheimer's early work. In his theory of isomorphism K?hler held that "psychological events were structurally similar to the corresponding physical pro 51

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms cesses in the brain."85 He argued that a fundamental correspondence existed between the order of the phsyical world and the way in which the human mind ordered perceptual events. They both followed the same law of regularity and simplicity, or a fundamental tendency to parsimony. While K?hler refrained from the study of "thought" per se, and instead focused on the brain, he postulated a correspondence between the working of the cerebral context and psychological events to the extent that both produced "structural wholes." But it was Wertheimer, rather than K?hler and Koffka, who suggested the wider, social and political implications of Gestalt theory. When he published his first papers, in 1912, Max Wertheimer was thirty-two years old. He was born of a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague in 1880. As a young man he studied with von Ehrenfels. Wertheimer continued his work in philosophy and psychology at the University of Berlin and then at Warburg where he received his Ph.D. in 1904. Subsequently, he taught at the University of Frankfurt. There he met his lifelong friend, the musicologist Erich von Hornbostel, with whom he worked during the First World War on a direction finder, called playfully the "Wertbostel." During the war, Wertheimer met Albert Einstein, who in part inspired Productive Thinking. As the relatively unpublished dean of a non-conformist school of psychology, Wertheimer did not receive a full professorship at Frankfurt until 1929, at the age of forty-nine, which he held for only four years. Between 1933 and his death in 1943 Wertheimer taught philosophy and psychology at the New School. His English always rough, he used the piano, as he had in Germany, to punctuate his classroom discus? sions. In 1924 Wertheimer published a short paper on Gestalt theory. In it he explored the philosophical implications of his experimental work. He insisted that Gestalt theory demonstrated how structures, or the properties of whole systems, determined the parts. In his words, "The basic thesis of Gestalt theory is that there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole."86 Wertheimer extended his argument far beyond the issue of perception as he argued that all aspects of human life, including consciousness, exhibited Gestalt qualities which could be usefully examined by a Gestalt method. The Gestalt method of "seeing," he claimed, unraveled a reality which had been hitherto hidden. Nineteenth-century psychologists, with their emphasis on formal logic, classification and deduction, had insisted that wholes were the 52

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms sums of their parts and operated consistent with laws which governed the behavior of particular parts. Humans, too, behaved similarly. In reaction to such a mechanical view, German theorists like Dilthey had proposed an intellectual alternative which radically separated the cultural from the natural sciences. Dilthey and others called for a separate discipline of human or cultural science, Kulturwissenschaft, which assumed that human consciousness was unique and distinct from all other natural phenomena. For Wertheimer, such a Kulturwis? senschaft separated humanity one step further from its larger, natural context and thereby denied its relationship to the whole of reality. Wertheimer proposed at one time to abandon the atomism of "naive" scientific naturalism and avoid the implicit dualism between "mind and nature" of Kulturwissenschaft. If human behavior was to be understood as more than a response to external stimuli, then the relationship between the human and natural had to be "seen" as reciprocal. Wertheimer declared that knowledge of such things as democ? racy, truth, ethics, or freedom necessitated a distinction between form and essence. The truth of the moment, he argued, was not the same thing as the "Truth," democracy was not simply majority rule but "a whole attitude toward life," and freedom was not the absence of restraints but a quality indicative of the whole social and political context.87 Wertheimer insisted that behind the apparent diversity of events lay "essential" structural similarities which determined the nature of the parts.88 Gestalt theory illuminated the relationship of the mind to the systems which organized external reality. The truth, or ethical norms, could be identified only by looking at events in the "right way." The "correct form" of seeing, or what Wertheimer called "productive thinking," was itself an application of Gestalt theory to questions of creativity as well as politics.89 Drawing on his previous experimental work, he proposed a "new" scientific method by which to interpret the meaning of consciousness and the structural unit of external reality. Gestalt theory required a willful shift or alteration in the way in which the mind apprehended phenomena. This shift, or "transition," was crucial to creative thinking. It enabled the mind to grasp the structural wholeness of a given problem and understand its Gestalt quality. Using problems drawn from mathematics, Werthei? mer distinguished between what he called "add-summative" processes of calculation in which the solution was the consequence of a series of cumulative steps, and "productive thinking" in which the relationships inherent in the problem determined its solution. In this manner, Wertheimer hoped to demonstrate the difference 53

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms between learned or acquired methods drawn from traditional systems of Western logic, and the inherent human ability to perceive structural wholes. The act of "centering" or seeing anew, was central to this method, and represented, "a shift in consciousness which springs from the very nature of the structural tensions in the problem to be solved."90 Wertheimer described the Gestalt "method" as an exercise in willful consciousness that enabled the observer to so shift perspective as to "forget" about the "self in thinking." He believed that Gestalt thinking was scientific in that it required an act of "centering" as the transition from the naive to the critical which produced the corre? spondence between mental perception, and phenomenal reality.91. In the 1930s, Wertheimer drew upon his Gestalt theory to address questions of truth, democracy, ethics and freedom.92 In the last decade of his life he wrote what might be called four Gestalt parables. These four short essays represent a statement of Wertheimer's philosophical musings. His "scientific poetry" reveals a determined search for wholeness and universality wherein he hinted at the existence of a rational mind which might comprehend human "essence." While these philosophical-political explorations extended Wertheimer's previously quite technical work, they seem to have been prompted by his early recognition of the serious threat that Hitler represented. In 1933, shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, but well before the university purges in April, Wertheimer caught a segment of one of Hitler's radio speeches. After listening for several minutes he snapped off the receiver, called his family together, and announced that they were to leave Germany that day. Wertheimer did not need to wait for the April Decrees to know that his days in Germany were over. He and his family moved to Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia, where several months later Lederer and Johnson contacted them.93 Wertheimer's "liberal-democratic" commitments were similar to those of his Social Democratic colleagues on the Graduate Faculty. Posing his questions in epistemological terms, Wertheimer argued that formal democracy, or popular control, had been an illusion in postwar Germany. Weimar Germany had only superficially embraced democratic values. The failure of the Weimar Republic was neither a failure of "liberalism" as he understood it or "democracy." It had, though, by introducing majoritarian forms and rhetoric, opened the door to disaster. The Nazis, through a combination of electoral participation and violence, had replaced the democratic forms of Weimar with a thorough-going "totalitarianism" that had no regard for individual or minority rights or even legal due process. Wertheimer believed that if western society were to avoid such

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This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "totalitarian" disasters in the future as it democratized, it must embrace the spirit or essence of Enlightenment humanism as articu? lated by Kant and Spinoza. Without a fundamental commitment to tolerance, rational discourse, and individual freedom, a classless, majoritanian society could not protect itself against its own totalitar? ian potential. Wertheimer's notion of Gestalt or wholeness provided his colleagues on the Graduate Faculty with an epistemological theory that enabled them as social scientists to continue to speak in terms of "essences" without reference to discredited forms of philosophical idealism. At times such concepts as "democracy," "liberalism," and "totalitarianism," seemed more real to them than actual historical events. Despite their repeated assertions of the empirical basis of all thought, more often than not, they continued to think in terms of essence as ideological purity seemed all important. Lederer, Speier, Staudinger, Wunderlich, Ascoli, and Werthei? mer had all found in Nazism a perversion of their most cherished ideals. A classless society, for Lederer, now evoked images of the unchained, deracinated masses while, for Staudinger, a social commu? nity had been metamorphized into a racial one. Likewise, democracy ultimately revealed to Speier and Ascoli the shadow of a tyrannical human mass while Wunderlich saw egalitarianism used to reaffirm traditional and patriarchal values. But they all agreed that the crisis of fascism had been caused by social changes, and not by a crisis in "modernist" values. Ascoli and Wunderlich went one step further by blaming much of the crisis on the political process itself. They all concurred, however, that fascism was a "modern" phenomenon which attacked the values and social structures necessary for human dignity and individual freedom. It denied the liberal ideals which were at the center of their own humanist commitments. In its denial of the cosmopolitan belief in a freedom, tolerance, and intellectual discourse, fascism seemed a symptom of the democratic societies with which it warred. This emphasis on the interrelationship between democracy and fascism led the ?migr? intellectuals at the New School to reexam? ine their own intellectual and political heritage. They saw weakness, instability, and failure. German and Italian parliamentary democracy had been too fragile to withstand the assault. By the late 1930s it was clear that the spectre of German and Italian fascism threatened western civilization itself. Even in the United States, the public seemed vulnerable to fascist-like demagogic appeals. The refugees at the New School felt compelled to sound the alarm so that the United States did not also fall victim to totalitarian ideology.94 In the decade between 1933 and 1942 they tried to convince 55

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Americans that indeed "Hitler meant War." In time, they came to believe that Nazism was "essentially" indistinguishable from Soviet Communism. Their commitment to the "spirit of the Enlightenment" linked them to their American counterparts at the New School. Faced with the alternatives of fascist or communist totalitarianism, there seemed little essential difference between Social Democrats and lib? eral democrats. For Emil Lederer, Hans Speier, Hans Staudinger, Max Ascoli, Frieda Wunderlich, and Max Wertheimer, fascism stood at odds with those western cultural values they most cherished. They concluded that the humane remnant of that culture existed only in the new world and had to be protected. Liberal America seemed the only effective bulwark to the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. In this regard they anticipated the work of Hannah Arendt, who while their contemporary, did not join the Graduate Faculty until the 1960s. By the outbreak of the Second World War the Graduate Faculty had established its identity. It had reached a rough consensus on the meaning of fascism and linked it to Stalinism. In forging the concept of totalitarianism as the anthithesis of individual liberty and parliamen? tary democracy, they merged socialist and liberal perspecives into a defense of American constitutional democracy.

NOTES

1. Hans Speier, ed., War in Our Times (New York: 1938). 2. For a good discussion of their "Enlightenment" commitments see Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951) which was first published in German in 1932. Cassirer himself became an ?migr? to the United States shortly after the book's publication. 3. The text of Mierendorff s "testimony" and that of sixty-five others is found in the German Exile Archive, S.U.N.Y., Albany. 4. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," and "Science as a Vocation," in H. Gerth and C. Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 5. See in particular Weber's essay, "Objectivity in the Social Sciences," originally published in Archiv f?r Sozialwissenschaften und Sozial Politik (1904) and reprinted in Edward Shils and H.A. Finch, eds., trans, by T. Parsons, Methodology in the Social Sciences, (New York: 1959). 6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930). 7. Hans Speier, "Emil Lederer: Leben und Werk" in Kapitalismus, Klassenstruktur und Probleme der Democratic in Deutschland 1910-19UO

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This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms (G?ttingen: 1979), pp. 253-90. 8. Emil Lederer, "Social Control versus Economic Law" in Social Research, I, (February, 1934), pp. 3-21. 9. Lederer, "Social Control," p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 12. 11. Emil Lederer, "Freedom and Science," Social Research, I, (March, 1934), pp. 218-30. 12. Emil Lederer and Jacob Marschak, "The New Middle Class," Social Research, VIII, (1936), p. 6-45. 13. Kenneth J. Arrow, "Jacob Marschak," Challenge (1978), pp. 69-71. 14. "The New Middle Class," pp. 6-38. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 45. 17. Hans Speier, The Salaried Employee in German Society (New York, 1939). 18. Hans Speier, Interview (New York: October 18, 1978). 19. Hans Speier, "The Social Determination of Ideas," Social Research, V, (1938), pp. 182-206. 20. Hans Speier, "Honor and Social Structure," Social Research, VII, (February, 1935), pp. 74-98. 21. Speier, The Salaried Employee. See also, "Social Stratification" in E. Heimann and M. Ascoli, eds., Political and Economic Democracy, (New York: 1937) p. 30. 22. Interview, Hans Speier (New York: October, 1978). 23. Speier, The Salaried Employee, p. 53. 24. Ibid., pp. 110-20. 25. Ibid., p. 45. 26. Speier, "The Salaried Employee in Modern Society," Social Research, VI, (February, 1934), p. 80. 27. Hans Speier, Interview (New York: October, 1978). 28. Emil Lederer, The State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940). 29. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans, by J. Strachey, (New York: Bantam, 1960). 30. Lederer, State of the Masses, p. 22. 31. Ibid., p. 33. 32. Ibid., p. 73. 33. Ibid., p. 127. 34. Ibid., p. 140. 35. Ibid., p. 152. 36. Ibid., p. 173. 37. Hans Staudinger, Interview (New York: November, 1978). 38. Ibid. 39. Hans Staudinger, Individuum und Gemeinschaft in Der Kulturorgani? sation des Vereins Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1913). 40. Ferdinand T?nnies, Gemeinschaft und Geselleschaft, (Darmstadt: Wis 57

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970 [1887]). 41. Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 420-31. See also W.F. Br?ck, Social and Economic History of Germany 1888-1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 143-98. Br?ck credited Moellendorf with the invention of the term glenwirtschaft which Staudinger saw as a means to a gemeinwirtschaft, a planned or organized community. 42. Arnold Brecht, The Political Education of Arnold Brecht (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 322. 43. Gustav Stolper, The German Economy 1870 to the Present (New York: 1978), p. 118 and SOFINA, Belgium utility report, "Memorandum on New Business Development in the Electric Light and Power Industry in Germany 1932-1936," (Brussels: 1936), p. 2. 44. Staudinger told the story of his closest assistant, a Communist infiltra? tor in his Socialist group, tipping him off at the last moment, "Don't take the ferry tonight," Interview (November, 1978). 45. Staudinger, Interview (New York: December, 1978). 46. Erich Hula, Interview, (October 15,1978); Johnson to Else Staudinger, (May 8, 1968); Jehuda Riemer, Interview (July 25, 1978). 47. Hans Staudinger, Interview (New York: November, 1978). 48. Hans Staudinger, "The Future of Totalitarian Barter Trade Econ? omy," Social Research, VII, (1940), pp. 410-29. 49. Hans Staudinger, The Inner Nazi: A Critical Analysis of Mein Kampf, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, eds., (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1981). Franz Neuman, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: 1944). 50. Jehuda Riemer, transcript interview with Hans Staudinger (July 25, 1978), Staudinger Papers, State University of New York, Albany Archives. 51. Hans Staudinger, Interview (January, 1979). 52. Marian Ascoli, Interview (New York: November, 1979). 53. Max Ascoli and Arthur Feiller, Fascism for Whom (New York: 1938), p. 42. 54. See for example, Wilson H. Coates and Hayden V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism, Vol. II, (New York: 1970) and H. Stuart Hughes, Con? sciousness and Society (New York: Vintage, 1961) as well as Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1933) for a more elaborate discussion. 55. Allen Cassels, Two Faces of Fascism, (New York: 1972). 56. Max Ascoli, "No. 38 Becomes a Citizen," Atlantic Monthly, CLXV, (1940), pp. 168-73. 57. Ascoli and Feiller, Fascism for Whom, p. 57. 58. Ibid., p. 90. 59. Max Ascoli, "The Fascist March on Scholarship," The American Scholar, (1938), pp. 50-89. 60. Max Ascoli, "On Political Parties," Social Research, II, (1935), pp. 195 210. 58

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 61. Max Ascoli, Intelligence in Politics p. 182. 62. Ascoli and Feiller, Fascism for Whom, p. 42. 63. See her obituary in Social Research, (1966), pp. 1-3. 64. See her article "The German Unemployment Insurance Act of 1927" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics LUI, (1928), pp. 278-305. 65. Frieda Wunderlich, "Kapitalische Philosophie," Archiv fur Systema? tische Philosophie, III, (1916), pp. 219-38. 66. Frieda Wunderlich, "New Aspects of Unemployment in Germany," Social Research, I, (1934), pp. 97-111. 67. Frieda Wunderlich, "Some Aspects of Social Work in the German Democratic Republic," Social Research, III, (1936), pp. 19-36. 68. Ibid., p. 33. 69. Wunderlich, "New Aspects," pp. 109-10. 70. Ibid., p. 99. 71. Frieda Wunderlich, "Fascism and the German Middle Classes," Anti och Reivew, V, (Spring, 1945), pp. 56-66. 72. Frieda Wunderlich, "Women's Work in Germany," Social Research, III, (August, 1935), pp. 310-37. 73. Frieda Wunderlich, "Germany's Defense Economy and the Decay of Capitalism," Quarterly Journal of Economics, III, (May, 1938), pp. 409-32, 426. 74. Ibid., p. 430. 75. Ibid. 76. Henry Pachter, Interview (March, 1979). 77. Michael Wertheimer, "Max Wertheimer, Gestalt Prophet" in Gestalt Theory 2 (1980), pp. 3-17. 78. Wertheimer, "Experimentelle Studien ?ber das Sehen von Bewegung" Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 61 (1912), pp. 161-265. 79. Wolfgang Kohler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology, (Princeton, N.J.: 1969), p. 35. 80.1bid.,p. 37. 81. Mary Henle et al, Historical Conceptions of Psychology (New York: Springer Publishing, 1973). 82. Michael Wertheimer, "Gestalt Theory, Holistic Psychologies and Max Wertheimer" unpublished essay, p. 4. 83. Michael Wertheimer, "Max Wertheimer, Gestalt Prophet," p. 12. 84. K?hler, Task of Gestalt, p. 42. 85. Mary Henle, "Gestalt Psychology," pp. 209-13. 86. Max Wertheimer, "?ber Gestalttheorie" in Sunerdruk des Symposion der Kant-Geselleschaft, (Berlin 1924) republished as "Gestalt Theory," Social Research XI (1944). 87. Max Wertheimer, "On Truth," Social Research, 1 (1934), 135-36. 88. Max Wertheimer, "Some Problems in the Theory of Ethics," Social Research, pp. 353-67. 89. Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking, (New York: 1945). 90. Wertheimer, Productive Thinking, p. 181. 91. In its methodological sense Gestalt psychology is most derivative of 59

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:35:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms rationalism in general and, according to Michael Wertheimer, anticipates very closely the work of Husserl and phenomenology. Michael Wertheimer, Interview, 1981. 92. Max Wertheimer, "On the Concept of Democracy" in Ascoli and Lehman, Political and Economic Democracy (New York: 1937). 93. Interview, Michael Wertheimer, (Boulder, Colorado: October, 1981). Wertheimer had worked in 1918 with Einstein and Jacob Marschak to influence the German Reichstag to recognize the claims of the Czech Social Democratic party. 94. Hans Staudinger, Interview (February, 1979).

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