Political Stimuli
When I became aware of such problems, I had not yet even an inkling of their magnitude. I shall turn now to the gradual enlargement of the horizon that permitted me to discern their nature.
The stimuli for going deeper into the matter were provided by political events. Obviously, when you live in a time dominated by the recent Communist revolution in Russia, Marxism (and behind Marxism the work of Marx) becomes a matter of some importance for a political scientist. I began to get interested in the problem of ideologies. The second great stimulus was, of course, provided by the rise of Fascism and National Socialism. I studied the movements as they developed, and in one instance, the National Socialist case, I went into the questions of biological theory that were implied in the National Socialist race conception. My two books Rasse and Staat and Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte, both published in 1933,1 are the result of my preoccupation with biological theory. This interest in biology, as well as a certain amount of technical knowledge about genetics, went back to my studies in 1924–25 in New York, when a number of my friends were young biologists like Kurt Stern, who worked on drosophyla genetics in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. The numerous evenings spent in the company of these young people, my frequent visits to the laboratory, and the familiarity I acquired with the development of mutations were an invaluable basis for understanding the problems of biology involved in the race question. The result of my studies, of course, was not quite compatible with National Socialism, and the second one of the books mentioned, Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte, which presented the genesis of the idea from its beginnings in the eighteenth century, was withdrawn from circulation by the publisher and the remainder of the edition was destroyed. That is the reason why this book, which I consider one of my better efforts, has remained practically unknown, though it would be of considerable help in the contemporary, rather dilettantic, debates between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists. Biological theory has remained one of my permanent interests, just as physics has so remained from my initial start on its problems in my last years of high school.
A further broad range of materials that had hitherto escaped my notice was again imposed by a political stimulus. After 1933, Austrian resistance to National Socialism led to the civil war situation of 1934 and to the establishment of the so-called authoritarian state. Since the conception of the authoritarian constitution was closely related to the ideas of the Quadragesimo anno [1931], as well as of earlier papal encyclicals on social questions, I had to go into these materials; and I could not get very deeply into them without acquiring some understanding of their background in Thomistic philosophy. In the years 1933–1936, my interests in neo-Thomism began to develop. I read the works of A. D. Sertillanges, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and then got even more fascinated by the not-so Thomistic but rather Augustinian Jesuits like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac. To this study, extending over many years, I owe my knowledge of medieval philosophy and its problems.
1. CW, vols. 2 and 3, in English translation.