This article traces Kurt H. Wolff’s involvement with Italy, from his first sojourn in the 1930s as a German Jewish intellectual in exile to the end of his life. Wolff developed profound ties with the country that hosted him, and that he was forced to abandon once racial laws were introduced there on the eve of World War II. Nonetheless, throughout his life he regarded Italy as an elective homeland of sorts. Wolff’s Italian experience is revisited through (...) a detailed examination of the places where he resided, his activities as a student, teacher, and scholar, and the many individuals with whom he associated, many of whom became his lifelong friends and collaborators. The documentary evidence collected here includes unpublished conversations with some of Wolff’s Italian connections and serves for a consideration of how his ties to Italy had an impact on the development of his sociological and esthetic theories. (shrink)

Romano Guardini was one of the most important intellectuals of German Catholicism in the twentieth century. He influenced nearly an entire generation of German Catholic theologians and was the leading figure of the German Catholic youth movement as it grew exponentially in the 1920s. Yet there are many open questions about his early intellectual development and his academic contribution to religious, cultural, social and political questions in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialist Germany. This article draws upon Guardini’s (...) publications, the secondary literature on Guardini and on some archival material, seeking to outline his early development and his engagement with the ideological context following World War I and in National Socialist Germany. Here Guardini’s criticisms of the modern age are presented. Besides this many other issues are addressed, such as his criticism of the women’s movement, his understanding of the youth movement, reception of Carl Schmitt, views of race, interpretation of the controversial Volk-concept, contribution to a Jewish journal in 1933, and his basic positions on the issues of obedience, order and authority. While Guardini was viewed critically by some National Socialists in the Third Reich, the administrative correspondences on him in the 1940s actually show that there was an internal debate about him among the National Socialist officials. This involved different figures, including a diplomat who came to Guardini’s defense. The internal disagreements were made more complicated because Guardini’s brothers were apparently members of the Fascist Party in Italy at this time. (shrink)

Romano Guardini was one of the most important intellectuals of German Catholicism in the twentieth century. He influenced nearly an entire generation of German Catholic theologians and was the leading figure of the German Catholic youth movement as it grew exponentially in the 1920s. Yet there are many open questions about his early intellectual development and his academic contribution to religious, cultural, social and political questions in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialist Germany. This article draws upon Guardini’s (...) publications, the secondary literature on Guardini and on some archival material, seeking to outline his early development and his engagement with the ideological context following World War I and in National Socialist Germany. Here Guardini’s criticisms of the modern age are presented. Besides this many other issues are addressed, such as his criticism of the women’s movement, his understanding of the youth movement, reception of Carl Schmitt, views of race, interpretation of the controversial Volk-concept, contribution to a Jewish journal in 1933, and his basic positions on the issues of obedience, order and authority. While Guardini was viewed critically by some National Socialists in the Third Reich, the administrative correspondences on him in the 1940s actually show that there was an internal debate about him among the National Socialist officials. This involved different figures, including a diplomat who came to Guardini’s defense. The internal disagreements were made more complicated because Guardini’s brothers were apparently members of the Fascist Party in Italy at this time. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This article explores the policies of discrimination and oppression towards Protestant communities in interwar Italy exercised by the state authorities and often incited by the Catholic Church. In particular, the circumstances in the multi-ethnic north-eastern region, the Julian March, are analysed in the context of so-called Border Fascism. The Protestant Churches had had in the past a prevalently ethnic character, but with the annexation to Italy, their background had been in several cases either concealed or, through migrations, Italians (...) eventually became majorities. Another significant characteristic is that Slovene and Croatian minorities only rarely adhered to Protestantism, other than the relatively few Seventh-day Adventists and ‘Fratelli’. Based on the archival documents, oppressive actions of the Fascist authorities against Adventists in Trieste as a response to a complaint by the Catholic curia accusing them of proselytism are reconstructed. The investigations and harassments of Adventists show all basic similarities to the episodes of oppression against certain Protestant minorities in other parts of Italy, while the nationality of their members was a crucial factor in determining why of all minority religions, aside from the Jewish, it was this community which experienced the most oppressive police treatment in the Julian March region. (shrink)

Fascism has traditionally been characterized as irrational and anti-intellectual, finding expression exclusively as a cluster of myths, emotions, instincts, and hatreds. This intellectual history of Italian Fascism--the product of four decades of work by one of the leading experts on the subject in the English-speaking world--provides an alternative account. A. James Gregor argues that Italian Fascism may have been a flawed system of belief, but it was neither more nor less irrational than other revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century. Gregor (...) makes this case by presenting for the first time a chronological account of the major intellectual figures of Italian Fascism, tracing how the movement's ideas evolved in response to social and political developments inside and outside of Italy.Gregor follows Fascist thought from its beginnings in socialist ideology about the time of the First World War--when Mussolini himself was a leader of revolutionary socialism--through its evolution into a separate body of thought and to its destruction in the Second World War. Along the way, Gregor offers extended accounts of some of Italian Fascism's major thinkers, including Sergio Panunzio and Ugo Spirito, Alfredo Rocco, and Julius Evola, a bizarre and sinister figure who has inspired much contemporary "neofascism."Gregor's account reveals the flaws and tensions that dogged Fascist thought from the beginning, but shows that if we want to come to grips with one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century, we nevertheless need to understand that Fascism had serious intellectual as well as visceral roots. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern EuropeNoah J. EfronAlmost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with other (...) intellectual and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.”Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it.By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk... (shrink)

ExcerptWith the acceptance of race-based discrimination the entire front of Italian culture has collapsed. Vittorio Foa, letter, November 20, 19381This essay will focus on one specific aspect in the attitude of intellectuals toward anti-Semitism in Italy: not the “theoretical” aspect (by which I mean their ideological support or their propaganda contributions to the anti-Jewish campaign, although those too were significant), but the practical one, i.e., their individual and collective behavior in the face of the bureaucratic process through (...) which the anti-Jewish legislation was applied in the field of high culture. As recent research has shown,…. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dark Arts of Politics:Aesthetics and Engineering in Nazism and FascismJonathan AllenThe Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 271 pp.Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Architect, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 291 pp.Despite their obvious centrality to the history of the twentieth century, sixty years after the defeat (...) of the Axis powers fascism and Nazism remain elusive phenomena, hard to define with any real clarity. Scholars wrangle not only over the identification of their central characteristics but also over whether the similarities between fascism and Nazism are close enough to justify considering them as parts of a single category. A growing number of studies, however, ranging from general histories such as Norman Davies's Europe: A History and Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, to more specialized works such as Zeev Sternhell's Neither Left Nor Right and Robert Paxton's fine The Anatomy of Fascism, argue the case for treating fascism and Nazism together.1 A mark of all of these books is their willingness to give serious attention to fascist ideologies and to the interactions between these ideologies and fascist practice and culture. This interest, in turn, makes it necessary to examine anew broader questions about the relations between fascism and the circumstances and attitudes of modern life.The two works under consideration here—The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, and Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp—share the growing concern to take seriously fascist ideology and culture as essential to an understanding of the movement. Michaud sets out to present an analysis of Nazi myth, which he argues was constructed with reference to two models: art and Christianity (xii). His immensely erudite study relates Nazi conceptions of the leader to Romantic views of genius and Christian doctrines concerning the role of the Savior. This allows him to present a distinctive view of Nazi ideology, one that relates it to themes and debates that have figured prominently in the history of European culture and belief. [End Page 113]Schnapp, on the other hand, focuses on the career of a single man—Gaetano Ciocca. Though Ciocca is now an obscure figure, unlikely to be familiar even to most students of fascism, Schnapp argues that his career deserves attention for several reasons. In the first place, he "strove to translate a fascist politics into the language of modern technics in the domains of architecture, urbanism, theater design, animal husbandry, drainage and transportation systems" (7). What is more, Ciocca was no power-hungry opportunist but rather a committed and reflective intellectual, who spent much of his time writing books and articles aimed at explaining and justifying his various projects to a general audience. Last but not least, though Ciocca's passionate commitment to fascism cooled as World War II wore on, this had no visible effect on his engineering projects. In the aftermath of the war, Ciocca presented himself as a nonpolitical "rebuilder" concerned to provide for popular need. In this guise, he served Italy's postwar liberal democracy as enthusiastically as he had previously devoted his projects to the cause of fascism. Ciocca thus presents us with an intriguing puzzle: a committed and reflective fascist intellectual—no Eichmann, Schnapp insists—who was nevertheless able to function equally effectively after the demise of the fascist regime. Schnapp argues that Ciocca's career forces us to examine with care the complex relations between technologies and political ideologies. In fact, I think it compels us to consider more general questions about the extent to which Ciocca's conception of himself as a modernizing technocrat could be equally at home in the political contexts of fascism and a certain kind of elite-centered liberal democracy. Schnapp hints at this issue at several moments but does not address it in a sustained way.Though there have been some notable exceptions, most studies of Nazism in particular have tended to gravitate toward one of two explanatory options. The first, more common in philosophical circles, has been to view... (shrink)

ExcerptThe debate about persecutory Fascist legislation, in its anti-Jewish and racial-colonial1 articulation, has represented one of the most innovative branches of historical research in Italy in the last twenty years.2 In 1988, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of anti-Jewish legislation marked the symbolic beginning of fruitful studies on the racial character of Fascism. It allowed the integration, development, and refinement of the research carried out for a long time only by Renzo De (...) Felice and Meir Michaelis.3The actual enforcement of persecutory legislation, especially against the Italian Jewish minority, has been an object of detailed study…. (shrink)

“If something begins when it acquires a name, we can date the beginnings of fascism precisely,” states the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, the Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, at the start of what is bound to be a controversial book (p. 24). Contradicting Zev Sternhell, the author of major books on fascism who has repeatedly named France as the intellectual cradle of fascism, Paxton asserts that Italy is where fascism started. The date was March 23, 1919, when (...) Mussolini and some one hundred of his cronies, the fasci italiani di combattimento, held a meeting in a room of…. (shrink)

In this paper I ask how Arendt, a relatively obscure Zionist activist, became a public intellectual in postwar US and Europe. I argue that Arendt’s idealization of Europe—that is her presentation of a federal Europe as the political and cultural ideal for other peoples to imitate—accounts for her postwar success in both Euro-American and German and Jewish-American public spheres. An analysis of Arendt’s writings during the period shows that she idealized Europe despite also condemning European fascism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. (...) I also show that Arendt’s idealization of Europe determined her self-presentation. While much has been made of Arendt’s insistence on identifying as a Jew, in fact in the postwar period she identified alternatively, as a Jewish, European, and non-national public intellectual. She held these varying identifications precisely because her idealized view of Europe led her to conflate Jewish and European identities despite also considering these to be separate. (shrink)

Written in 1939 while the philosopher Karl Lowith was in exile in Japan, and first published in Germany in 1986, this autobiography focuses on the years 1914-39, a crucial period in the growth of Hitler's Germany. It covers Lowith's youth in Germany, his emigration to Italy and from there to Japan, and his meeting with Martin Heidegger in Rome in 1936. Included are philosophical-biographical vignettes of leading German intellectual figures of the day: the George circle, Oswald Spengler, Karl Barth, (...) and Carl Schmitt. My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 represents the search by a German-Jewish intellectual for political and cultural identity in the Germany of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It provides a valuable account of the intellectual and social ambience before and after 1933 and will be of value to philosophers, intellectual historians, and those interested in German history. (shrink)

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts, Edited by R. Bessel, (Cambridge University Press, 1996) 242 pp. £35 cloth, £12.95 paper. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. By E. Gentile (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996). 208 pp. $49.95 cloth.

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history (...) of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power. (shrink)

This book covers the fascist period in Italy and Giovanni Gentile as a man and his works.

A selection of the work of an outstanding Jewish scholar which stretches across the entire spectrum of Jewish creativity from the Hellenistic to the modern period.

The understanding of the meaning of Jewish identity in Clement Greenberg's work follows the deep relationship between the conception of Modernism and the interpretation of Franz Kafka's short story The Great Wall of China. Greenberg, whose role as one of the first american popularizers of Kafka's narratives has been relevant, ascribes to the bohemian author an halachic reasoning closely related to his jewish origins. This strictly firm and normative mindset finds resemblances in Greenberg's modernist theory and critical practice, (...) which, according to Susan Noyes-Platt's study, could be interpreted as a derivation, in many aspects, of his Jewish origins and, particularly, as the critic's need to preserve his intellectual thinking from the nazi-fascist advance. Moreover, the article proposes to interpret Greenberg's purism as a form of messianism, that is a faith in a future, but indefinitely belated, absolute purification of the medium. (shrink)

This essay revisits the significance of Kaufmann's Toledot ha-emunah ha-yisre'elit in Jewish intellectual history, as its reception has hitherto been somewhat reductive. His work is generally viewed as an anti-Christian polemic with a Zionist agenda that sought to glorify the formative period of his people. A closer look at his intellectual background, as well as his theoretical framework, leads us to a different understanding of his work in general and of its alleged nationalistic features in particular. The essay shows, (...) inter alia, that Kaufmann was already making a Diltheyan hermeneutic turn decades before others in his field. (shrink)

Against the Modern World is the first history of Traditionalism, an important yet surprisingly little-known twentieth-century anti-modern movement. Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States, touching the lives of many individuals. French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age and sought to reconstruct the Perennial (...) Philosophy - the central truths behind all the major world religions. Guenon stressed the urgent need for the West's remaining spiritual and intellectual elite to find personal and collective salvation in the surviving vestiges of ancient religious traditions. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to his call. In Europe, America, and the Islamic world, Traditionalists founded institutes, Sufi brotherhoods, Masonic lodges, and secret societies. Some attempted unsuccessfully to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalist ideas were the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and in the Islamic world entered the debate about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Although its appeal in the West was ultimately limited, Traditionalism has wielded enormous influence in religious studies, through the work of such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. (shrink)

Controversy has long surrounded the complex relationship between King Victor Emmanuel III and the dictator Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. It is clear that the king played decisive roles in bringing Mussolini to power in 1922 and in removing him in 1943. In between, the two coexisted as Italy became a ‘dyarchy’, with two foci of power. The presence of the monarchy at once checked Fascist radicalism and persuaded many conservatives to adhere to the regime. Thanks (...) especially to the monarchy, the innovative thrust of Fascism was channelled in certain delimited directions, toward a statist economy, for example. Still, the relationship between the crown and Mussolini was often rocky, though the king’s reluctance did not prevent alliance with Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism, and war. Tensions were largely papered over by rhetoric and myth-making, as if the elements of Fascism fit together neatly. Despite his opposition to certain particulars, Victor Emmanuel identified with the overall Fascist project to some extent, and he worried that outright opposition to the regime would jeopardize the monarchy. But as the Second World War went badly for Italy, the king finally deposed Mussolini. Nevertheless, Italy soon voted to eliminate the monarchy, discredited by its association with fascism. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in (...) Marx but by no means ending with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

Tzvetan Todorov, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals, explores the complex relations between art, politics, and ethics in the essays that make up _The Limits of Art_. In one essay, “Artists and Dictators,” Todorov traces the intimate relationship between avant-garde art and radical politics in pre-revolutionary Russia, pre-fascist Italy, and pre-Nazi Germany. Todorov sets forth the radical idea that the project of totalitarian dictators and avant-garde artists actually “emerged from the same womb”: both artists and dictators set out (...) to make it new—be it art or society. Further troubling the role of art in the world at large, in “Art and Ethics” Todorov re-examines the age-old question of what can be expected from art and whether it should be emancipated from ethics. Must art be morally instructive, or should it be self-sufficient and concept-free? The answer is not an either/or to Todorov, who believes, like Baudelaire, that art has both cognitive and ethical aspects to it—even if it is presented as art for art’s sake. Throughout the essays in _The Limits of Art_, Todorov insists on the essential need for artists to recognize, understand, and even love the world outside. “Todorov harbors no illusions about the mix of good and bad that enters into the fabric of all that is human.... He speaks throughout in his own voice, with rare breadth of sympathy and with a fine eye for the complexities of human experience.”—_New Republic_ “Like the authors he focuses on, Todorov is tolerant, understanding and wise.”—_Observer_. (shrink)

Tamar Rudavsky's erudite survey of Jewish philosophy during the Middle Ages is the latest compendium of a wide array of thinkers who profoundly constructed bridges between the two worlds of Jewish beliefs informed by the Hebrew Bible and its rabbinic overlay at one end, and of science and philosophy dominated by Aristotelian physics and metaphysics at the other. Jewish philosophers, like their Islamic and Christian counterparts, tirelessly exerted themselves to reconcile the two into a unified system. The (...) very title of Maimonides's seminal Guide of the Perplexed reflects his attempt to resolve the angst of his intellectually sophisticated coreligionists who faced an irreconcilable either/or choice between the... (shrink)

Karl Popper is one of this century's most influential philosophers, but his life in fin-de siècle and interwar Vienna, and his exile in New Zealand during World War II, have so far remained shrouded in mystery. This intellectual 2001 biography recovers the legacy of the young Popper; the progressive, cosmopolitan, Viennese socialist who combated fascism, revolutionized the philosophy of science, and envisioned the Open Society. Malachi Hacohen delves into his archives and draws a compelling portrait of the philosopher, the assimilated (...) Jewish intelligentsia, and the vanished culture of Red Vienna, which was decimated by Nazism. Hacohen's adventurous biography restores Popper's works to their original Central European contexts and, at the same time, shows that they have urgent messages for contemporary politics and philosophy. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in (...) Marx but by no means ending with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

In his beautiful and haunting novel The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis, Giorgio Bassani, the well known Jewish Italian writer, records the calm, happy life of the Jewish community of Ferrara, in north Italy, in the 1920s and 1930s, the growth of Fascism and the response of the Jewish and non‐Jewish Italians to it. The main characters are the wealthy, aristocratic family of the Finzi‐Continis and their friends and their response to the changing political climate in (...) their town. It is also the unhappy love‐story of Giorgio and Micòl Finzi‐Continis. The novel ends with the deportation of all the family and the whole Jewish community to the concentration camps in Germany and their certain death. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 173 ducente un monde interamente unificato dall'azione divina. Ma, come egli stesso ritiene di avere mostrato nell'altro sue libro, Le probl~raede l'ttre chezAristote, questo fu soltanto l'ideale di Aristotele, mentre la sua filosofia effettiva ne rimase infinitamente Iontana. L'etica di Aristotele si pu6 definire allora un umanesimo tragieo: umanesimo, in quanto presuppons la fiducia nell'uomo, nella sua ricerca e nella sua azione; tragieo, in quanto si costituisce (...) proprio nella distanza che separa l'uomo da Die: Aristotele invita l'uomo a volere tutto il possibile, ma solo il possibile, e a lasciare il resto agli dei (pp. 174-177). Nell'appendice, dedicata al tema dell'amieizia in Aristotele, I'A. mostra come anche questa virtfl, analogamente alla prudenza, sia espressione dell'imperfezione dell'uomo, il quale, non potendo trovare la propria felicit~ nella contemplazione e nelI'amore dise stesso, come Die, la cerca nel riconoscimento e nell'amore degli altri (pp. 179-183). Nel complesso si deve ammettere che lo studio dell'A. ~ il tentative pifl interessante e pih moderno che sia state fatto per collegare logicamente l'etica di Aristotele con la sua metafisica, e si deve riconoscere che tale tentative, nonostante qualche affermazione discutibile, ~ perfettamente riuseito. Esso infatti conserva all'etica aristotelica quel carattere di problematicit~ e di asistematicit~ che ne costituisce la pifi genuina natura e che altri tentativi analoghi finiscone invece inevitabilmente col sopprimere. Ci6 che rende possibile la sua riuscita b la nuova interpretazione della metafisica aristotelica, che I'A. ha sviluppato nella sua opera precedente ed in base alla quale anche la metafisica, come l'etica, lungi dal presentarsi come una costruzione sistematica e rigidamente dimostrativa, rivela una natura essenzialmente problematica. L'unica riserva di fondo che ritengo di dover muovere a tale interpretazione, ~ quella a cui he avuto occasione di accennare recensendo Le probl~me de l'$tre chez Aristote (cf. "Giornale di Metafisica", XVIII, 1963, 266-271), e cio~ che la problematicit~ della metafisica aristoteliea non significa rinunzia ad affermare con certezza razionale la trascendenza di Die, ma anzi si risolve proprio in questa affermazione, la quale, lungi dall'essere uno scacco o un insuccesso, 6, al contrario, la pifi esaltante delle certezze. Analogamente la problematicit~ dell'etica arlstotelica non significa rinunzia all'affermazione di un valore supreme, ma riconoscimento della sua necessitY, anche se l'uomo non giunger~, mai ad attuarlo. Come nella metafisica il sapere dell'uomo si risolve in definitiva nslla continua ricerca del sapere, cio~ nella consapevolezza dell'esistenza di un sapere superiore a quello puramente umano, cosi nell'etica la perfezione dell'uomo si risolve nella stessa aspirazione alla perfezione, cio~ nell'ineessante sforzo di autoperfezionarsi. Tale precisazione, a mio avviso, ~ necessaria, per evitare chela metafisica di Aristotele venga interpretata come una forma di scetticismo e la sua etica come una forma di relativismo. ENRICO BERTI Perugia, Italy Consolation ]or the Tribulations o] Israel (Consola~am as Tribula~oens de Israel). By Samuel Usque. Translated from the Portuguese by Martin A. Cohen. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society of America, 1965. Pp. xiii + 354. $6.00.) This work, the first in a new scholarly series of translations of texts, is a fascinating document. It was probably written in Italy around 1550 and was first published in Portuguese in Ferrara in 1553. Although it was not widely read at the time, it was republished around the end of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands. By now it is a Portuguese classic, and a unique document in Jewish intellectual history. Usque, whose biography is almost unknown except for clues found in the Consola~am, was apparently a Portuguese New Christian (a forced convert) who fled during the persecutions of Judaizers by the Inquisition in the 1530's. He wandered in Europe and the Levant, visited Palestine, and settled down in Italy, probably in the entourage of Samuel Abravanel (the brother of Leon Ebreo), Dona Gracia Nasi (the aunt and mother-in-law of the Duke of Naxos), and Hercules of Este, the Duke of Ferrara. His book, addressed "to the gentlemen of the Diapora of Portugal" is a pastoral and a dialogue, dealing with Israel's fate. Writing just 174 HISTORY OF... (shrink)

Already translated into ten languages, this brief testament to the transformative power of ideas is resonating with readers—especially the rising generation—throughout the world. _Nobility of Spirit _is a spiritual journey to the source of those values—especially truth, freedom and dignity—that must be sustained in order for civilization to flourish. Riemen explores the tradition from Socrates and Spinoza, to Goethe, Whitman, and Thomas Mann—singular individuals who courageously refused to compromise their ideals, and he engages with them with great insight, intimacy and (...) invention. It is the anti-fascist Mann with whom Riemen feels a particular affinity, and who serves as a beacon to a world free of barbarism. Mann’s 1945 volume, _Nobility of Spirit: Sixteen Essays on the Problem of Humanity_, inspires the form of Riemen’s inquiry. Indeed, Riemen’s eloquent meditation on "nobility of spirit" begins with an extraordinary encounter with Elisabeth Mann Borghese, guardian of the oceans, and the last surviving daughter of the great author of _The Magic Mountain_ and other masterworks. Riemen’s slim, powerful volume ends with an essay on Leone Ginsberg, an Italian Jewish intellectual murdered by the Nazis, who implores his wife—the novelist Natalia Ginsburg—to “be brave” as he is taken to his death. Ultimately, Riemen calls for all of us to “be brave” as we battle those forces—terror, hate and ignorance—that are conspiring against humanity. (shrink)

The public intellectual has been the subject of a lively scholarly debate for over two decades, especially in the US. There, it is often said that intellectuals have increasingly lost interest in speaking to a broad public and engaging with important real-world issues. Advocates of this view condemn academics’ distance from reality and their propensity for abstract theorizing – something that it is said has been primarily inspired by Rawls’s normative political theory. Supporters of ‘engaged’ philosophy argue that this (...) abstract and ostensibly sophisticated framework is highly obscure to the public. In addition, its implicit moralism is at odds with the actual needs of the political realm towards which it is directed. This paper suggests that Rawls’s normative theory had a unique impact on Italian philosophy. Here, what I call the ‘public intellectual’ refers to a new approach to both political philosophy and intellectual activity, which was developed in Italy as a theoretical alternative to a more traditional ‘engaged’ model. (shrink)

Modern Italy is frequently diagnosed with having suffered an excess of ideological antagonism. However, poststructuralist political theory implies that, as a form of negative exclusion, antagonism serves a crucial purpose in shaping political discourse and delimiting social and political identities. This essay outlines the poststructuralist argument and sets out an agenda for rethinking ideological conflict in the Italian context. Taking the rise and decline of Italian Anti?Fascism as an example, it argues that antagonism is as important to ideological coherence (...) as is the positive content of political ideology itself. (shrink)

As indicated by the title, this book contains seven very scholarly essays on Jewish life and thought in the 19th century. Of particular interest to philosophers is Prof. Emil L. Fackenheim's essay, "Samuel Hirsch and Hegel: A Study of Hirsch's Religionsphilosophie der Juden." In this essay, Fackenheim's masterful knowledge of Hegel is clearly visible. The thirty page essay contains a profound awareness of the theological problems inherent in Hegel's philosophy of religion as well as an awareness of how these (...) problems were explicitly engendered by Hegel's metaphysics. As an introduction to some of Hegel's basic themes, Fackenheim has provided an invaluable, if, unfortunately, all too brief, introduction.—D. J. B. (shrink)

Almost a century after the emergence of right-wing dictatorships in twentieth-century Europe, a consensual regime paradigm has yet to be found. The debate always gets bogged down by ongoing attempts to find the definitive and complete definition of the two most common regime types: fascism or generic fascism, and totalitarianism/authoritarianism. This article claims that, although definitive nomenclatures are unlikely to be found, it is more useful to think of regimes as more or less approximating their ideal type than to posit (...) their typologies in abstract terms. It therefore analyzes a key aspect of three dictatorial regimes: the functioning of the consensus-building institutions in Nazi Germany, in Fascist Italy, and in Salazarist Portugal. Propaganda is central to an understanding of these regimes, because it constitutes their ideological footprint—revealing what it aims for (inputs) and its capacity to impose those goals or make them popular (output). The three regimes examined here were very different from each other, and these differences can help us verify the degree to which each of them attained the standard of the totalitarian ideal type. (shrink)

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events (...) of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence-based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of "the philosopher of fascism," Giovanni Gentile , in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the "presentification of the past." This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual (...) idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural "L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica" , Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of Fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in Fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past. (shrink)

Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking—on (...) topics such as transcendence, redemption, revelation, and politics—were reinterpreted in an atmosphere of increasing disillusion and fragmentation. In Interim Judaism, Michael L. Morgan traces the evolution of this shift in values, as expressed in the work of social thinkers, novelists, artists, and poets as well as philosophers and theologians at the beginning and end of the century. Focusing on the problem of objectivity, the experience of the transcendent, and the relationship between redemption and politics, he argues that the outcome for contemporary Jews is a pragmatic style of religiosity that has abandoned traditional conceptions of Judaism and is searching and waiting for new ones, a condition that he describes as "interim Judaism." Published with the generous support of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. (shrink)