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Between the Charybdis of Capitalism and the Scylla of Communism: The Emigration of German Social Scientists, 1933-1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Irving Louis Horowitz
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Extract

I would like to examine two aspects of German scholarly emigration to the Western democracies, especially the United States and Great Britain. I do not necessarily seek to offer a full explanation of this complex historical and ideological issue, but rather an analysis that attempts to avoid the maze of sociological generalizing that has grown up around the politically inspired migration of scholars.

Let me state quite frankly that I am neither a devotee of the history of ideas approach nor an apologist for any particular group of exiles or their ideology. Rather, I seek to understand the common denominators, or better, the root elements that recently led René König (1984) to locate the source of the German sociological exodus in the virulent nationalism of the 1920s, and to argue that the fusion of conservative and radical elements in post-1933 rational socialism was a culmination rather than a cause of social scientific breakdown. As Otto Neurath put this plight: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ships on the open sea without benefit of a dock, or an opportunity to select the best replacement parts” (Blum, 1985).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Summer 1987 , pp. 113 - 138
Copyright
copyright © Social Science History Association 1987 

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Footnotes

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on “Deutschsprachige sozialwissenschaftliche Emigration 1933-1945 und ihre Wirkung.” Held at the Universitat Konstanz, in Konstanz, Germany.

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