Richard Löwenthal

Infobox Person
name = Richard Löwenthal


caption =
birth_date = Birth date|1908|04|15
birth_place = Berlin, Germany
death_date = Death date and age|1991|08|09|1908|04|15
death_place = Berlin, Germany
other_names =
known_for = For arguing for a post-totalitarianism interpretation of Soviet politics.
occupation = Political scientist
nationality = German.

Richard Löwenthal (April 15, 1908, Berlin, Germany-August 9, 1991, Berlin, Germany) was a German journalist and professor who wrote mostly on the problems of democracy, communism, and world politics.

Life

Löwenthal was the son of Ernst and Anna Löwenthal . His father was a real estate agent. From 1926 until 1931, Löwenthal studied political science, economics, and sociology at Berlin University and Heidelberg University. His major intellectual influences were Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. From 1926 until 1929, Löwenthal was a member of the Communist Party of Germany, which he left over opposition to the tactics of the Comintern. Remaining on the Left, Löwenthal was a member of several dissident breakaway groups from the KPD in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

In 1933 Löwenthal was a prominent member of the anti-Nazi group "Neu Beginnen" (New Beginnings) which sought to organize the German working class to overthrow the Nazi regime. During this period, Löwenthal adopted the alias Paul Sering. In July 1933, the New Beginnings group broke up under the impact of a huge wave of Gestapo arrests of its members. As a wanted man, Löwenthal continued to work for an anti-Nazi working-class revolution until increasing pressure from the Gestapo led Löwenthal to flee to the United Kingdom in August 1935. Subsequently Löwenthal moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia where he remained active in left-wing German émigré groups. From April 1936 until October 1937, Löwenthal worked as a researcher in London before returning to Prague. Following the Munich Agreement of 1938, Löwenthal fled to Paris, France and then in 1939 returned to London, which was to be Löwenthal’s home until 1959. During the 1930s, in his writings Löwenthal expressed strong criticism of the definition of fascism proposed by the Comintern, and in particular criticized the Comintern’s social fascism theory which held that moderate left-wing groups such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Labour Party were much fascist as were the Nazi Party, and if anything were more dangerous because of their “disguised” fascist nature as opposed to the “open fascism” of the Nazis. Starting in 1935, Löwenthal started to work on as his own definition of Fascism, which was strongly influenced by the work of Otto Bauer and Franz Leopold Neumann. In these writings, Löwenthal concluded that Nazi Germany was not a puppet of Big Business as the Comintern had claimed and that in fact the Nazi regime was in and of itself the supreme power in the land. During the late 1930s, Löwenthal decided that another world war was inevitable, and saw his main task as preparing the German left for that war.

During his time in Britain, Löwenthal was close to the Fabian Society and helped to publish "The International Socialist Forum". From 1940 until 1942, Löwenthal served as speaker for the BBC’s German language program. In 1941, Löwenthal published a book that argued in the post-world war, it was highly necessary for the Soviet Union to be given the lion’s share of the responsibility of governing Germany after the war as the best of ensuring the triumph of the German Left. After 1943, Löwenthal disallowed this position and instead urged that the main responsibility of re-building Germany after the war be given to the Western powers, who were in Löwenthal ’s opinion the best powers for ensuring a democratic Germany. Löwenthal very much admired the Labour Party and in several articles after 1945 urged that West Germany adopted the Britain as model for it’s economic organization. In 1945, Löwenthal joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In his 1948 book "Jenseits des Kapitalismus", Lowenthal called for a Socialist reconstruction of the European system with an especially prominent role to be allocated to Great Britain as the most progressive of the European powers ["Second Chance: Two Centuries Of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom" edited by Werner E. Mosse, Julius Carlebach, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Aubrey Newman, Arnold Paucker, Peter Pulzer , J.C.B. Mohr, London, 1991 page 134] . An Anglophile, Lowenthal was much influenced by his time in Britain. Lowenthal was late to write that “In England the German socialist emigrants got to know an impressive model of a free democracy which proved its worth under extreme external pressure; thus they were essentially confirmed in their democratic conviction and prepared for the task that awaited them after the war. The English, at least those who lent the emigrant an ear and cooperated with them, gathered new hope that a true democracy might be established in Germany and contributed considerably to the realization of this model during the first harsh postwar years. After a lapse of several decades, I can thus state with conviction that in spite of all the initial difficulties, the encounter proved rewarding to both sides” ["Second Chance: Two Centuries Of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom" edited by Werner E. Mosse, Julius Carlebach, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Aubrey Newman, Arnold Paucker, Peter Pulzer , J.C.B. Mohr, London, 1991 page 135.] .

Until 1958, Löwenthal worked as a reporter for Reuters press agency and "The Observer" newspaper. In 1959 Löwenthal became a professor in political science at the Free University of Berlin. In 1974 Löwenthal became the Professor Emeritus at the Free University. Löwenthal ’s chief interests were Communism and Eastern Europe. In 1960, Löwenthal married the sociologist Charlotte Abrahamsohn. Löwenthal was a strong advocate of closer European integration and of an Atlanticist orientation. In the late 1960s, Löwenthal was initially sympathetic towards student protestors, but turned against what he regarded as the destructive anarchism and “romantic relapse” into Marxism of the New Left and rejected their call for a West German pull-out from NATO as opening the door for the Soviet conquest of Western Europe.

In work on the Soviet Union, Löwenthal’s major interests were the emergence of what he considered to an element of pluralism into Soviet politics, especially during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike other totalitarianism theories such as Juan Linz and Karl Dietrich Bracher, whose work was chiefly inspired by studying Nazi Germany Löwenthal based his studies largely upon developments in the Soviet Union and East Bloc [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . One of Löwenthal’s more notable ideas was that under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union had been a totalitarian state, but what emerged after Stalin’s death was a system Löwenthal called variously “post-totalitarian authoritarianism” or "authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchy" in which the Soviet state remained omnipotent in theory and highly authoritarian in practice, but did scale down considerably the scale of repression and allow much greater level of pluralism into public life [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . In regards to foreign policy, Löwenthal argued that after Stalin, and even more so, after the overthrow of Khruschchev, the ideological commitments that underlined Soviet foreign policy were considerably weakened [“The Soviets and the West: A European View” pages 83-91 from "Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science", Volume 28, Issue 1, April 1965 page 83-84.] . Despite this, Löwenthal maintained that Soviet foreign policy remained basically antagonistic towards the West, and that the Cold War would continue as long as the Soviet Union was an anti-democratic state [“The Soviets and the West: A European View” pages 83-91 from "Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science", Volume 28, Issue 1, April 1965 pages 86-87.] . In the mid-1960s, Löwenthal was highly critical of the policy of United States, or lack thereof, as Löwenthal asserted that the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson had no policy of rallying together the states of Western Europe to resist Soviet encroachments, and was instead content to let matters drift [“The Soviets and the West: A European View” pages 83-91 from "Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science", Volume 28, Issue 1, April 1965 pages 90-91.] . At the same time, Löwenthal was opposed to the French President Charles de Gaulle's anti-American policies, which Löwenthal felt were folly in light of the threat from the East [“The Soviets and the West: A European View” pages 83-91 from "Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science", Volume 28, Issue 1, April 1965 pages 83-84 & 89-91.] .

In Löwenthal's opinion, the ending of the "revolution from above" also marked the end of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . Likewise, Löwenthal maintained that in the "post-totalitarian" system meant that henceforward the powers of Communist Party leaders over their Central Committees and Politburos were no greater then the powers of a Western Prime Minister over their Cabinets [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . Löwenthal argued "Those countries have not gone from tyranny to freedom, but from massive terror to a rule of meanness, ensuring stability at the risk of stagnation" [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . Moreover, Löwenthal argued that the essence of Communist totalitarianism was an utopian faith [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 251] . Löwenthal contened that Communist utopianism was doomed to failure "as it conflicted with, and eventually succumbed to, the necessity for economic modernization" [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 251] . Without utopianism, Löwenthal argued that "revolutions from above" were excluded as a policy option [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 243] . In a 1986 article in "Commentary", Löwenthal claimed that totalitarianism was a dead force in the East Bloc, even through none of the regimes were anything close to being "liberalized" [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 251] . Moreover, Löwenthal asserted it was impossible for the East Bloc regimes to return to totalitarianism, arguing that "that particular secular religion is dead-at least in those countries that have tried it out" [Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 page 251] .

Besides for his work in Soviet studies, Löwenthal was noted for his defense of the Federal Republic. Lowenthal felt that the best the Federal Republic was the most democratic government in German history, and criticized the left-wing philosopher Jürgen Habermas for utopianism when the latter asserted in the 1970s that the Federal Republic was not democratic enough [Nove, Alec “Some Observations on Criteria for the Study of the Soviet Union” pages 13-37 from "Sozialismus in Theorie und Praxis" edited by Hannelore Horn, Alexander Schwan & Thomas Weingartner , Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1978 page 13] . A major intellectual in the SPD, Löwenthal was often consulted by the SPD’s leaders, especially Willy Brandt and Ernst Reuter.

Work

*Co-written with Willy Brandt "Ernst Reuter, ein Leben für die Frieheit; eine politische Biographie", München: Kindler, 1957.
* “Diplomacy and Revolution: The Dialectics of a Dispute” pages 1-24 from "The China Quarterly", Issue # 5 January- March 1961.
*“Factors of Unity and Factors of Conflict” pages 106-116 from "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science", Volume 349, September 1963.
*"World Communism : the Disintegration of a Secular Faith", New York : Oxford University Press, 1964.
* “The Soviets and the West: A European View” pages 83-91 from "Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science", Volume 28, Issue 1, April 1965
*(Editor) "Issues in the Future of Asia : Communist and Non-Communist Alternatives", New York : Praeger, 1969.
*"Romantischer Rückfall", Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer 1970.
*"Die zweite Republik; 25 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland: eine Bilanz", Stuttgart, Seewald Verlag 1974.
*"Vom Kalten Krieg zur Ostpolitik", Stuttgart : Seewald, 1974 ISBN 3512003648.
*"Model or Ally? : The Communist Powers and the Developing Countries", New York : Oxford University Press, 1977 ISBN 0195021053.
*(Editor) "End and beginning : on the Generations of cultures and the Origins of the West" by Franz Borkenau, New York : Columbia University Press, 1981, 0231050666.
*"Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945", Berlin : Dietz, 1984 ISBN 3801230082.
*"Social Change and Cultural Crisis", New York : Columbia University Press, 1984 ISBN 0231056443.

Endnotes

References

*Fitzsimons ,M.A. “Apology to Richard Löwenthal” page 285 from "The Review of Politics", Volume 25, Issue # 2 April 1963.
*(Editors) Hannelore Horn, Alexander Schwan & Thomas Weingartner "Sozialismus in Theorie und Praxis : Festschrift für Richard Löwenthal zum 70. Geburtstag am 15. April 1978", Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1978 ISBN 3110072211.
*"Second Chance: Two Centuries Of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom" edited by Werner E. Mosse, Julius Carlebach, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Aubrey Newman, Arnold Paucker, Peter Pulzer , J.C.B. Mohr, London, 1991, ISBN 978-3161457418.
*Laqueur, Walter "The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet history from 1917 to the Present", New York : Scribner's, 1987 ISBN 0684189038.

External links

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E2DB1739F930A35751C0A963948260&sec=&pagewanted=print WAS STALIN INEVITABLE?] by Richard Löwenthal