3 - History of political theory in the Federal Republic of Germany: strange death and slow recovery

Summary

Intellectual developments in Germany during the period after the Second World War were overshadowed by the search for the causes for the rise of National Socialism and its ability to hold the Germans under its sway for more than a decade. The Allied policies of ‘re-education’, attempting to bring about the intellectual re-orientation of the Germans away from their past nationalist tendencies, towards more Wester-noriented political ideas were welcomed by many, as they seemed to offer a way out of the disaster, and all the more as they supported the Germans' very own liberal and democratic traditions, which had been long suppressed but which now experienced a quick recovery.

Even so, there was no sudden rupture with the past. Traditional authoritarian and nationalist views did not disappear overnight, neither in the public at large, nor among academics. Indeed, some of the dominant intellectual figures of the late 1920s raised their voices again, and initially there were but few others. The philosopher Arnold Gehlen propagated a social anthropology which lent intellectual support to the idea of an authoritarian society. Alfred Weber's cultural sociology was becoming very popular, even though it was strongly reminiscent of the intellectual climate of the 1920s. Its thrust was directed against modern technocratic society, which was allegedly about to destroy European individualistic culture as it was known. Its underlying cultural pessimism, reflecting Weber's regret of what he considered to be the progressive alienation in industrial society of the natural roots of human beings, did not necessarily favour the emergence in Federal Germany of a Western-modelled democratic society.