The German Genius

born in Görlitz, in 1902, and Albert Hirschman, born in Berlin in 1915, both became important figures soon after leaving Hitler’s Germany. Morgenstern was a consultant to the Rand Corporation, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the White House, and Hirschman was at first the principal assistant to Varian Fry, helping refugee intellectuals and artists escape over the Pyrenees; he later served on the Federal Reserve Board. 48 Hirschman was the author of several books, including Private and Public Happiness (1982), an original work on how these two are—and are not—related. But his most influential work is probably his first book, Strategy of Economic Development , in which he pointed out that many other economic theorists had selected one or another overriding factor as the main determinant of economic performance—be it natural resources, capital, entrepreneurship, or creative minorities. Usually, as one determinant was adopted, the others were jettisoned, and Hirschman thought it time to acknowledge that such an approach was inadequate, that monocausal explanations explained nothing. Instead, we should acknowledge that economic development depends on discovering resources and abilities that “are hidden, scattered or badly utilised.” 49 He has now become among the most cited of social scientists.
    Peter Drucker (1909–2005) was the best known of three German-speaking refugees who were interested above all in consumer behavior (the others were George Katona and Fritz Redlich). He taught at Bennington College before becoming professor of management at New York University and much enjoyed making management a speciality and consumer behavior the focus of rational research. His books reflect that interest: The End of Economic Man (1939), The Future of Industrial Man (1941), The Concept of the Corporation (1946), and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974). Drucker’s main aim was to help people adjust to the modern world by emphasizing the difference—too often not appreciated—between nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism and modern, postindustrial, managerial capitalism. Lewis Coser called him “a Max Weber for managers,” except that whereas Weber was gloomy about “instrumental reason,” Drucker thought it was the main means to salvation in the modern world. 50 He also thought that business promotes tolerance—because blacks and women are customers too. In 1980, The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America surged into the best-seller lists as yet another good-news message that the American way combined capitalism and socialism almost without knowing it. Drucker and Lazarsfeld were two German Dr. Panglosses among the many other cultural pessimists.
     
     
    Among German philosophers in America, the greatest success story is that of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). As already noted, the members of the Vienna Circle were among the first refugees to arrive in the United States and were well received because their attempt to put an end to metaphysics found resonance with American pragmatists such as John Dewey and Willard van Quine. 51
    Born in Barmen in northwestern Germany, Carnap came from a family of deeply religious Protestant weavers. 52 After his father died when he was still quite young, Carnap was taught by his mother before studying mathematics, philosophy, and physics at Freiburg and at Jena, where he studied under Gottlob Frege. 53 He was drafted in 1917 and stationed in Berlin where revolution broke out the following year, a development Carnap welcomed. He retained his socialist beliefs all his life and for him, and others like him, the Weimar years were exciting. His main aim, like that of the others who made up the Vienna Circle, was “the final overthrow of all metaphysical speculation, all references to transcendent entities, and their replacement by resolutely this-world empiricism, informed by the symbolic logic of Frege and Russell.” 54 He was also opposed to the specifically German idea that there is a fundamental divide between the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften , the social sciences and the humanities. Instead, he held that there are only two types of knowledge—the purely formal and the empirical. This approach led to Carnap’s best-known work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt ( The Logical Structure of the World ; 1928), which effectively sums up the aims of the Vienna Circle. He was offered a position at the University of