Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich

Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich
Author: David Weinstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-07-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316738876

Hans Baron, Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Erich Auerbach were among the many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who fled Continental Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Their scholarship, though not normally considered together, is studied here to demonstrate how, despite their different disciplines and distinctive modes of working, they responded polemically in the guise of traditional scholarship to their shared trauma. For each, the political calamity of European fascism was a profound intellectual crisis, requiring an intellectual response which Weinstein and Zakai now contextualize, ideologically and politically. They exemplify just how extensively, and sometimes how subtly, 1930s and 1940s scholarship was used not only to explain, but to fight the political evils that had infected modernity, victimizing so many. An original perspective on a popular area of research, this book draws upon a mass of secondary literature to provide an innovative and valuable contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history.

Jewish Exiles’ Psychological Interpretations of Nazism

Jewish Exiles’ Psychological Interpretations of Nazism
Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3030540707

This book examines works of four German-Jewish scholars who, in their places of exile, sought to probe the pathology of the Nazi mind: Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), and Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). While scholars have examined these authors’ individual legacies, no comparative analysis of their shared concerns has yet been undertaken, nor have the content and form of their psychological inquiries into Nazism been seriously and systematically analyzed. Yet, the sense of urgency in their works calls for attention. They all took up their pens to counter Nazi barbarism, believing, like the English jurist and judge Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in 1753 - scribere est agere ("to write is to act").

The Pen Confronts the Sword

The Pen Confronts the Sword
Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2018-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438471653

During 1942, the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein raged and the Nazi genocide was at its lethal peak. The Pen Confronts the Sword examines the shared motives behind four remarkable texts German exiles began writing that year: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947); Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State (1946); Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Each identified a specific danger in Nazi ideology and mustered new theories, approaches, and sources to combat it. The books aimed to expose the encompassing catastrophes of German culture (Mann), politics (Cassirer), philology (Auerbach), and philosophy and sociology (Horkheimer and Adorno). Their scope, mastery, and sense of urgency constitute a comprehensive Kulturkampf (culture war) against Nazi barbarism. Avihu Zakai cogently analyzes each work, explains the context of its creation, and draws connections between these four landmark books in Western intellectual history.

Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America

Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America
Author: Adi Armon
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-09-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030243893

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss’ immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss’ worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss’s intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss’ The City and Man (1964) as a representative of his political teaching.

Markets, Morals, Politics

Markets, Morals, Politics
Author: BŽla Kapossy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0674976339

When Istv‡n Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of HontÕs contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas, and methods. Richard Tuck, John Pocock, John Dunn, Raymond Geuss, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Sonenscher, John Robertson, Keith Tribe, Pasquale Pasquino, and Peter N. Miller contribute original essays on themes Hont treated with penetrating insight: the politics of commerce, debt, and luxury; the morality of markets; and economic limits on state power. The authors delve into questions about the relationship between states and markets, politics and economics, through examinations of key Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment figures in contextÑHobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to HontÕs lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx. The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to HontÕs influence while developing its own provocative and illuminating arguments. Markets, Morals, Politics will be a valuable companion to readers of Hont and anyone concerned with political economy and the history of ideas.

After Kant

After Kant
Author: Michael Sonenscher
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691245630

"A reflection on the legacy of money, law, and history in modern political thought"--

A Forgotten Christian Deist

A Forgotten Christian Deist
Author: Jan van den Berg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000417859

This is a cultural and intellectual biography of a neglected but important figure, Thomas Morgan (1671/2–1743). Educated at Bridgewater Academy, he was active as Presbyterian preacher, medical practitioner, and one of the first who called himself a Christian Deist. Morgan was not only a harbinger of the disparagement of the Old Testament, but also a prolific pamphleteer about things religious, and a publisher of medical books. He received praise for his medical work, but a negative press for his theological visions, and he ended as a forgotten figure in history; this book restores an overlooked writer to his due place in history. It is the first modern biography of Morgan and its readership comprises historians of deism, the enlightenment, the eighteenth century, theology and the church, Presbyterianism, and medical history.

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust
Author: Adam J. Goldwyn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031114736

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization and the Enlightenment through critiques of their foundational texts and to imagine the place of the Homeric epics in a new post-War humanism. The book thus also explores the reception of these writers, analyzing how Jewish child-survivors like Geoffrey Hartman and Hélène Cixous and writers of the post-Holocaust generation like Daniel Mendelsohn continued to read the epics as narratives of grief, trauma, and woundedness into the twenty-first century. .

Exile, Diaspora, and Return

Exile, Diaspora, and Return
Author: Luis Roniger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190693967

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface -- Chapter 1 - Exile and Post-Exile in Analytical Perspective -- Chapter 2 - Escape, Deportation and Exile: The Contours of Institutionalized Exclusion -- Chapter 3 - Exile and Diaspora Politics: Mobilizing to Undo Exclusion -- Chapter 4 - Diaspora and Home Country Initiatives, Transnational Networks and State Policies -- Chapter 5 - Surviving Authoritarianism, Contributing to the Agenda of Democratization -- Chapter 6 - Undoing Exile? Remembering, Imagining, Envisioning -- Chapter 7 - The Transformational Role of Culture and Education: Impacting the Future -- Chapter 8 - Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship -- Conclusions -- About the Authors -- Index