Social Events and Social Science: a Personal Case Report on Open‐ended Causality

Extract

THE OUTLOOK OF ALL MEMBERS OF THE GENERATION OF social scientists contributing to this issue certainly bears the imprint of the upsurge of National Socialism and the chain of events this entailed and which led to the Second world War. On their part, these events are directly embedded in the aftermath of the First World War which began with the Bolshevik Revolution and was in many respects overshadowed by it. Some specificality of my way of relating to the more immediate background is accounted for by the fact that I experienced the events as a German Jew who decided to join in the return to the Jewish homeland, then Palestine. Furthermore, I left Germany in 1936 not only as a Zionist but also as a ‘Bernsteinist’ revisionist who remained unshaken in his belief that ‘Weimar’ had not suffered defeat as the result of a basic systemic weakness of liberal democracy which could accommodate social reform acceptable to an electoral majority. Ineptitude, shortsightedness and above all the lack of toughness of the German leaders dedicated to the democratic republic were one set of factors that made possible the victory of the Nazis.