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on Freud, Pareto, Spengler, Zionism, the philosophy of science,
death, and similar subjects. And he received little critical attention.
Now a Borkenau revival may be under way . In 1981, Columbia
University published Borkenau's
End and Beginning-
a novel inter–
pretation of the making of Western civilization in a post-Spenglerian
perspective . A 1952 analysis predicting the Sino-Soviet split was
edited by me in
The China Quarterly
in June 1983 . Columbia U ni–
versity Press is now translating Borkenau's
magnum opus
on the for–
mation of bourgeois intellectual hegemony,
Der Ubergang vomJeudalen
zum burgerlichen Weltbild.
I.
Franz Carolus Richard Albert Borkenau (1900-1957) is almost
invisible in accounts of the Comintern, Austro-Marxism, Frankfurt
School politics, and the cold war. This may reflect his heterodoxy and
unfashionableness . Yet Borkenau's importance as a political activist
is, in the end, smaller than his place in the battle of ideas and the
progress of the historical sciences. His chief importance, and his last–
ing contribution, is in the intellectual
avant garde,
in brilliant books :
Ubergang
(1934),
The Spanish Cockpit
(1937),
World Communism (1938) ,
and
End and Beginning (1981).
The Spanish Cockpit,
which made Borkenau's international repu–
tation, remains a sociologist's
Homage to Catalonia. World Communism,
given the Russian and Comintern roles in Spain, was a logical se–
quel to it. These two classics established Borkenau as an exception–
ally incisive analyst and as a critic of political myths, giving him a
running start on Kremlinology in the forties and fifties; and they
fitted into ongoing bodies of reportage and scholarship.
Ubergang
and
End and Beginning
break new ground and consti–
tute challenges to understanding and judgment, requiring a different
concentration . Like other European historiosophers of the
haute ecole
from Vico to Voegelin, Borkenau fascinates us with so many diverse
topics - death, the supreme value of technology, the frescoes of
San Clemente, Pascal, the Song of Roland, and subatomic inde–
terminacy, etc., that any discussion going beyond essentials in a
brief essay is necessarily arbitrary and distorting.
His life's work and times are sketched on the pages with which
Richard Lowenthal, his literary executor, introduces
End and Begin-
i
