Malachi Haim Hacohen

Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and “Central European Culture”*

“There was and there always will be something called the ‘Republic of Scholars,’” art historian Ernst Gombrich said recently. “We scientists or scholars, res publica litterarum, stick together and our home is our work. I do not feel myself an Englishman. I feel myself to be exactly what I am: a Central European who works in England.” Like other Central European emigres, Gombrich thought himself a member of a cosmopolitan scholarly community. But his self-identification as both a “Central European” (not an Austrian or Viennese) and a citizen of a timeless and contextless Republic of Letters seems strange. Neither interwar nor postwar Central Europe represented a unified entity, political or cultural, likely to draw the allegiance of an assimilated Jewish exile. Ethnonational tensions in the successor states to the Habsburg Empire, the Holocaust, the expulsions in the aftermath of World War II, and the Iron Curtain shattered whatever semblance of cultural unity Central Europe may have had. Gombrich recognized early on that Austria had no place for him. He emigrated to England in 1936 and tried desperately to convince family mem-

Karl Popper in Exile: The Viennese Progressive Imagination and the Making of The Open Society

This article explores the impact of Poppers exile on the formation of The Open Society. It proposes homelessness as a major motif in Poppers life and work. His emigration from clerical-fascist Austria, sojourn in New Zealand during World War II, and social isolation in postwar England constituted a permanent exile. In cosmopolitan philosophy, he searched for a new home. His unended quest issued in a liberal cosmopolitan vision of scientific and political communities pursuing truth and reform. The Open Society was their embodiment. As described, it expressed the ideals of fin-de-siècle Viennese progressives. Many progressives were assimilated Jews, whose dilemmas of national identity gave rise to cosmopolitan views that stripped ethnicity and nationality of significance. The Open Society was an admirable defense of liberalism against fascism, but it remained a utopian ideal. It could not provide a surrogate community or home where Popper might have reached his destination and rested.

Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism

The paper focuses on the problematic relationship between Talmons liberalism and Zionism. My argument is that Talmons nationalism (Zionism included)—historicist, romantic, visionary—lived in permanent tension with his liberalism—empiricist, pluralist, pragmatic. His critique of totalitarian democracy, reflecting his British experience, emerged independently from his Zionism, grounded in Central European nationalism. The two represented different worlds. Talmon lived in both, serving as an ambassador in-between them, without ever bringing them together. The essays first section describes the political education of the young Jacob Talmon (née Flajszer) and the making of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. It demonstrates the independence of Talmons Cold War liberal project from his Zionism. The second section places Talmon in the context of Cold War liberal discourse, showing how integral his critique of revolutionary politics was to contemporary liberalism. The third illustrates the tensions between Talmons view of Jewish history and his liberalism, between his Zionism and his critique of revolutionary politics. Focusing on Talmons analyses of nationalism, it highlights the ambiguity of his Zionism. ☆ Originally a lecture at the conference on “Jacob Talmon and Totalitarianism Today: Legacy and Revision”, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 28 December 2006.

Critical Rationalism, Logical Positivism, and the Poststructuralist Conundrum: Reconsidering the Neurath-Popper Debate

“Science does not rest on a rockbed. Its towering edifice, an amazingly bold structure of theories, rises over a swamp,” wrote Karl Popper (1902–1994) in the fall of 1932. “The foundations are piers going down into the swamp from above. They do not reach a natural base, but ... one resolves to be satisfied with their firmness, hoping they will carry the structure. ... The objectivity of science can be bought only at the cost of relativity.1 The tower over the swamp represented the end of foundationist philosophy. Objectivity no longer rested on a rockbed but on the turns of scientific experimentation and criticism, as much a matter of vagary and luck as of talent and method. Surely, historians should have written Popper into the hall of fame of nonfoundationist philosophers. They did not. In fact, recent scholarship on the Vienna Circle, especially on Otto Neurath, represents Popper as the foundationist philosopher par-excellence. Some of his followers seem to miss his nonfoundationism, too. A House Built on Sand is the title Popperian philosopher Noretta Koertge chose for a spirited collection of essays that takes aim at the follies of science studies.2 Alas, Popper describes science itself as built on sand (so whatever is wrong with science studies, it cannot be their choice of bedrock). But, then, why should historians and philosophers care about misreadings of Popper? Because they create a distorted picture of interwar Viennese philosophy that obscures, rather than reveals its contemporary relevance. This essay, focusing on the Neurath-Popper debate, attempts to redraw the picture and set the record straight.

ENVISIONING JEWISH CENTRAL EUROPE: FRIEDRICH TORBERG, THE AUSTRIAN ÉMIGRÉS, AND JEWISH EUROPEAN HISTORY

This essay uses the Viennese remigré writer and journalist, Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979), his Austrian Jewish cohort, and their invented “Central Europe” and “Austrian Literature” to argue for a paradigmatic shift in émigré historiography. The cosmopolitan narrative predominating in émigré historiography has marginalized traditional Judaism. By shifting the focus from the German to the Austrian émigrés, and from the European nation state to the Austrian Empire, historians can reclaim traditional Jewish culture and pluralize the hegemonic narrative. Late imperial Austria, constitutionally federalist and ethnically and culturally diverse, made room for a Jewish national culture in ways that Germany did not. The Austrian émigrés shaped visions of Central Europe that foregrounded Jewishness and provided wider space for Jewish life than comparable visions of leading German émigrés. Yet, even Austrian émigré visions remained largely incognizant of rabbinic culture, the core of traditional Jewish life. To make traditional Jews agents of Jewish European history, European historiography must now move to incorporate rabbinic culture.

Historicizing Deduction: Scientific Method, Critical Debate, and the Historian

If ever there were scientific procedures that seemed immune to history, induction and deduction would be them. Their validity seemingly unimpinged by the vicissitudes of history, they appear a proper subject of discussion for philosophers and scientists, but not for historians. Historians pride themselves on demonstrating that the internal logic of theory is historical — a response to particular conditions. Breakdowns in logic present historians with opportune moments for historicization, for showing how theoreticians’ efforts to respond to their situation made them move inconsistently. When it comes to induction and deduction, however, they seem so universal and basic — the logic and methodology of science unthinkable without them — that any effort to demonstrate their historically bound character risks relativizing science and, some would argue, undermine rational exchange. Can the historian participate, qua historian, in the conversation on induction and deduction without unraveling science and undermining rational exchange?

Karl Popper, the Open Society, and the Cosmopolitan Democratic Empire

In The Open Society, written in New Zealand during WWII, Karl Popper invented the cosmopolitan democratic empire as an antidote to ethnonationalism. Popper, a non-Marxist socialist, protested that the nation-state was a charade and, in his portrayal of classical Athens, merged the images of Austria-Hungary and the British Commonwealth into a utopian democratic empire. The empire was an open society that would provide a home to the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia, which was excluded on racial grounds from the European nation-states. Jews were not to expect, however, recognition of their culture: Assimilation remained the best solution to the Jewish Question. Emerging from Jewish anxiety, Popper’s cosmopolitanism formed a marvelous imperial vision that failed to allay his own fears of antisemitism.

Jacob & Esau Today: The End of a Two Millennia Paradigm?

The paradigm of Jacob & Esau, which portrayed Jewish-Christian relations for two-millennia, has collapsed in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel. Portrayals of Jacob & Esau have changed radically in both European and Israeli cultures. The two have moved in both parallel and opposite directions. Europeans have embraced the traditional Jewish Jacob and declared him European, indeed a model for European culture. Israeli writers, in contrast, have distanced themselves from the Jewish Jacob, whether rabbinic or Zionist, and converted him into a universal type, a lover and a mourner. Esau has been largely absent in non-Jewish discourse but has enjoyed rehabilitation among both Zionists and post-Zionists, most notably, among the Jewish Settlers. The new Jacob & Esau part with the traditional Jewish and Christian typologies. They mark an unprecedented age in Jewish history, and a new period in Jewish-Christian relations.

Book Review : D. W. Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice. London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. x + 187.

esteem among the English public. He wonders whether past philosophical practice might not provide a model of different institutional arrangements for &dquo;doing philosophy&dquo; Can the practice of philosophy outside the academy, supported by private patronage and engaging an educated public, somehow be restored? Can the dignity and stature of the discipline be reclaimed? Hamlyn’s understanding of &dquo;philosophy&dquo; reflects contemporary views of the scope and character of the field, and it decisively shapes his history. &dquo;My concern,&dquo; he says, &dquo;is with the practice of a living philosophy, something that really deserves the name ’philosophy’ and which makes consideration of its practice philosophically worthwhile&dquo; (6). He focuses on classical and modem philosophy to the detriment of late antique, medieval, and Renais-