JOHN E. TASHJEAN
293
Yet in the university Borkenau participated in a seminar highly
critical of Spengler and undertook a dissertation on the first English
universal history of mankind, George Sale's
Universal History .
But to
Borkenau, this was universal only in name; although encyclopedic
in factual material, it made no pretense of conceptual integration.
This defect is, in fact, the clue to the significance of the work . Borke–
nau concluded that this work of the middle eighteenth century pre–
dating Voltaire's
Histoire des Moeurs
by some years, marks the final
stage of the decomposition of all earlier historiography cast in the
Christian terms of original sin, the redemptive crucifixion, and the
last judgment to come. This theme of decomposition (and recon–
stitution) of a culture occurs first in the dissertation and recurs with
variations in Borkenau's
Ubergang
and
End and Beginning.
In November 1924 he finished the dissertation. After a brief
return to Vienna he went to work in Berlin as a staff member of the
Comintern office, where he did confidential analysis of political and
economic developments in various European countries . Under a
cover name, he became chief of all Communist university students
in Germany . In 1929, after some travels for the Comintern's West
European Bureau, he broke with the Communist Party over its new
policy of attacking the socialists and was marked a renegade.
This, as far as one can tell, was the end of his actual political
activism except for some "stay behind" or underground plotting,
which he did as a member of the
"Gruppe Funke"
of the Austrian Social
Democrats in 1933 . (It is reported and ridiculed in Buttinger's
In the
Twilight of Austrian Socialism
(1953) and also discussed in A. Rabin–
bach's
Crisis of Austrian Socialism
1927-1934
(1983).)
Martin Jay has suggested in
The Dialectical Imagination
that it
was thanks to the Austro-Marxist economist Gruenberg that Borke–
nau made the transition from Vienna to membership in the Frank–
furt Institute for Social Research, the home of "critical theory." Along
with Karl Wittfogel, he seems to have been something of an out–
sider. But aside from cliques and personalities, there was an increas–
ing intellectual divergence between the Austrian Borkenau and the
others. He was more sensitive to things Italian and approached fas–
cism through its theoretical expression in Pareto. And he accounted
for Hitlerian or racial anti-Semitism in specifically "Viennese" terms .
These terms, and his neo-Machiavellian interests, seemed incom–
patible with the Frankfurt Institute's efforts in exile after 1933 to syn–
thesize Freud and Marx.
