Stanford University Faculty

"Some of the most eminent Catholic theologians, such as Engelbert Krebs, Wilhelm Neuss, Karl Rahner and Romano Guardini, lost their university teaching posts under the Nazis. Krebs not only published articles reflecting his positive view of Judaism, but was denounced in August 1934 for saying at a private gathering in his brother’s house, “We are being governed by robbers, murderers and criminals’ a remark that resulted in several years of harassment, the loss of his job, a trial and imprisonment."

"Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties."

"Historically, of course, as has been pointed out by such thinkers as Marcel Gauchet and George Weigel Christianity had much to do with the notion of the autonomous, sacrosanct individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers."

"The major faultline running through the left wing of the working class, for by no means all workers came under the rubric, was hostility between the Communists and Social Democrats. Between 1928 and 1934 the Communist Party (KPD) adhered to an inflationary use of the term ‘fascism’ to describe not only the Nazis, but also the previous chancellors and the ‘social fascists’ of the ( SPD)"

"In 1920 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell spent five weeks in Bolshevik Russia as a member of a Labour Party delegation. The group hoped to discover a promised land, breaking into spontaneous choruses of the Internationale and Red Flag on spying the first Red banners across the border. After twenty-four hours Russell realized that there was not much to sing about."

"Just as the SS was the most implacable in its persecution of racially unwanted, so it single-mindedly pursued the goal of integrating all Germans on the basis of racial equality. Himmler sincerely meant it when he warned his German SS men to behave respectfully towards their foreign racial comrades."

"On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, the Orthodox Church claimed a hundred million adherents, two hundred thousand priests and monks, seventy-five thousand churches and chapels, over eleven hundred monasteries, thirty-seven thousand primary schools, fifty-seven seminaries and four university-level academies, not to speak of thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes and orphanages. Within a few years, the intuitional structures were swept away, the churches were desolated, vandalized or put to secular use. Many of the clergy were imprisoned or shot; appropriately enough the first concentration camp of the gulag was opened in a monastery in Artic regions."

"Many of history’s murderers have staked out the moral high ground, killing for love of confession or country, or in the name of social equality."

"Apparently inspired by the tidy coalmines of the Netherlands, the ‘Beauty of Labour’ section of the Labor Front tackled physical surroundings, providing improved air, light and space; decent canteens and washing facilities, and exteriors designed to make factories less forbidding. Employers with scruffy premises were warned and then stigmatized by inspectors. Each campaign was conducted under a slogan such as ‘Clean people in a clean plant’ or ‘Struggle against noise.’ Holistic talk of factory communities and of the whole man replaced over-emphasis upon the more limited question of enhancing worker productivity."

"The Labor Front’s leisure arm, ‘Strength through Joy’ (KdF) was heavily influenced by the ideas of the apostate Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man, who sought to fuse Marx and Freud , and the practice of such firms as Siemens in Berlin."

"Workers were encouraged to overcome a trades union mentality – Ley’s Germany Labor Front (DAF) rapidly ceased to describe itself as such – and to think in terms of a ‘socialism’ transcending mere bread and butter issues. In a departure from labourist economism, the Nazis recognized the workers’ need for respect, and the pride they took at their work, their skill, their tools, and the products of their labour, attitudes already evident in the modern technological sectors, such as aircraft or optical manufacturing. This lends plausibility to the idea that they were embarked on a revolution in consciousness, changing the way people perceived the world, rather than its material circumstances."

"The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality… Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was a ‘soul-malady.’ Many Nazis were also viscerally anti-clerical, up to and including resisting the emergence of a quasi-clerical caste in their own ranks. One would have to visit the Reformation or the extremes of liberal anti-clericalism in the modern era to find anything analogous to their vicious and vulgar attacks on priests."

"The Enabling Law permitted the government to pass budgets and promulgate laws, including those altering the constitution, for four years without parliamentary approval. In democracies, constitutional amendments are especially solemn moments; here they were easier than changing the traffic regulations. None of the guarantees Hitler extended to the Churches or the judiciary in his address to the Reichstag amounted to a hill of beans."

"For, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, Nazi Germany eschewed the doctrine of aggressive class war, whatever revolutionist animosities lingered, against the limp bourgeoisie in general."

"Whatever Christianity’s ambivalences and antagonisms towards the Jews, its core concerns with compassion and humility were anathema to a politics of racial egotism, and worship of brutality and strength. These ‘aspects’ of Christianity would have to be expunged. In Nazi eyes, Christianity was ‘foreign’ and ‘unnatural’, or what has been described as the Jews’ ‘posthumous poison’, a notion that Nazis picked up from Nietzsche."

"If faith and hope were integral to National Socialism, so too, surprisingly enough, was charity. This ceased to be an uncomplicated reflection of human altruism, still less something individuals do discreetly for the good of their souls, or to reap tax exemptions and titles. Instead, it became a favoured means of mobilising communal sentimentality, that most underrated, but quintessential, characteristic of Nazi Germany."

"By 1930, Nazi students had a majority in the unions of nine universities; by 1931 they had seized control of the national Deutsche Studentenschaft"

"The National Socialists not only joined the Communists in denouncing Social Democratic bosses, but also practiced egalitarianism, unlike bourgeois parties. One should not underestimate the extent to which working-class people bitterly resented being treated as infantile inferiors by the middle and upper classes."

"Nazi infiltration of interest groups and also the creation of parallel organizations, which gave the impression of a party listening attentively to particular grievances. It also reflected a totalitarian aspiration, in the sense that Nazis believed that no area of life was to remain unpolitical, and a very modern view that an aggregation of interests would facilitate an eventual political takeover."

"The Nazis offered a combination of economic nationalism with unorthodox anti-cyclical measures to stimulate employment."

"The Social Democrats were adamant that they did not want ‘a deformed socialism that creates a mass prison’: ‘we want to liberate, not oppress.’ The Stalinised Communists, since 1929 committed to their ‘social fascists’ line, were convinced that the ‘Nazis and Social Democrats stand on the foundation of capitalist private property and were slaves of capital and enemies of the workers… According to the Stalinist view that the most insidious enemy were immediately to the left – which had Stalin’s ( NKVD) imposing discipline on Trotskyites with a bullet to the head – leftist Social Democrats were the most dangerous of the ‘social fascists.’"

"Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazi thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological Great Chain of Being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons."

"In northern and western Germany, dynamic leaders such as Gregor Strasser and the Elberfeld journalist Joseph Goebbels wanted to concentrate on breaking into the urban socialist vote… These men espoused a Prussian socialism. Whereas Hitler had recently vented his animosity towards Russia, they regarded it ‘as the socialist nationalist state for which consciously or unconsciously the younger generation in all countries long.’"

"Feminists—in and out of science—often condemn masculine bias in the sciences from the vantage point of commitment to a value-free science. Androcentric bias, once identified, can then be seen as a violation of the rules, as "bad" science. Feminist science, by contrast, can eliminate that bias and produce better, good, more true, or gender-free science."

"I’d also like to, I may get in trouble with other members of the committee, just say how insane it is that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semiautomatic assault rifle like an AR-15."

"“We were not going to understand gender inequality or [other inequalities] unless we understood the interpersonal processes that mediated and enacted institutional structures and larger patterns of inequality.”"

"“No set of questions is more fundamental to sociology than those about inequality—what is it, why is it, how does it come about, and what can we do to change it.”"

"From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, events seemed to prove the Keynesians correct. Then, beginning in the 1960s, several distinguished economists began to challenge Keynesian ideas. Their counterrevolutionary views, which in many ways mirrored those of the classical economists, were strengthened by events in the 1970s, when the economy’s behavior began to contradict some Keynesian ideas. But in 2008 and 2009, as the economy sank into the most serious worldwide recession since the Great Depression, Keynesian ideas were once again at the center of a heated debate about the causes of the problem and the appropriate remedies."

"The appropriate critique of [...] sciences is not that they are not "objective" but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective (that is true, or reliable) being in the service of interests."

"Why do we know what we know and why don't we know what we don't know? What should we know and what shouldn't we know? How might we know differently?"

"Neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing. Neutrality refers to whether science takes a stand; objectivity, to whether science merits claims to reliability. The two need not have anything to do with each other. Certain sciences may be completely "objective" — that is, valid — and yet designed to serve certain political interests."

"The rejection of concern for practical goals expressed in the German Society for Sociology's founding charter represented the culmination of a debate in the Social Policy Association, the so-called Werturteilsstreit, in which a group of young political economists, including , Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, attacked the older generation of political economists for mixing facts and values, science and politics."

"Nazi philosophers also commonly expressed concerns about cruelty toward animals. In early 1933, Nazi representatives in the Prussian parliament called for legislation banning vivisection."

"It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences."

"The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating (with his wife, Anna Schapire-Neurath) Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are "independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns.""

"The ideal of value neutrality is not a single notion, but has arisen in the course of protracted struggles over the place that science should have in society."

"Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have "depoliticized" science (and many other areas of culture). The Nazis depoliticized science by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the "Fuhrer principle" replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis "depoliticized" problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms ... politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal."

"We seem to know a lot about knowledge. What is remarkable, though, is how little we know about ignorance."

"One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest anti-smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe -- Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco -- were all non-smokers"

"By contrast with diamonds or asbestos or granite or the minerals we burn for fuel, the lowly agate is the victim of scientific disinterest, the same kinds of structured apathy I have elsewhere called 'the social construction of ignorance.' Agates seem to fall outside the orbit of geological knowledge, and therefore tend to be regarded — if at all — as geological accidents or oddities not really deserving systematic study."

"We live in a golden age of ignorance, and Trump and are part of that."

"In early October of 1939, designated by the government as the year of "the duty to be healthy," Hitler authored a secret memo certifying that "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt are hereby commissioned to allow certain specified doctors to grant a mercy death [Gnadentod] to patients judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination.""

"In March 1937 the ' reported on the case of a farmer who had shot to death his sleeping son because the child was "mentally ill in a manner that threatened society""

"Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements... The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas, ...as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however... avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought."

"Powerfully positioned middlemen extract value by interrupting or distorting information."

"We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources."

"Our contribution to the study of organisations will be greatly enriched if we are able to discern the sources of institutional patterns, their subsequent elaboration and potency, the degree to which these forces are sustained, and the kinds of settings where they operate with the greatest resonance. This agenda is consonant with the core insights of the institutional approach: modern organisations are more likely to arise, expand, and survive in those settings where the social environment creates and sustains the basic building blocks of formal, rational organisation."

"Sociologists and anthropologists have long been concerned with how individuals are linked to one another and how these bonds of affiliation serve as both a lubricant for getting things done and a glue that provides order and meaning to social life. The attention to networks of association, which began in earnest in the 1970s, provided welcome texture and dynamism to portraits of social life. This work stood in stark contrast to the reigning approaches in the social sciences. In contrast to deterministic cultural (oversocialized) accounts, network analysis afforded room for human agency, and in contrast to individualist, atomized (undersocialized) approaches, networks emphasized structure and constraint (Granovetter, 1985). Network studies offered a middle ground, a third way, even if no one was quite sure whether networks were a metaphor, a method, or a theory (Barnes 1979). But the sociologists and anthropologists who initially studied networks did not pay sustained attention to economic activity, although some industrial sociologists (Roy, 1954; Dalton, 1959) had long stressed the role of informal networks as an antidote to formal organization practices and structures."

"When the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms."

"In a fundamental sense, Alchian's theory of economic organizations is different from those of Coase or Simon. He disavows an explicit model of individual choice... and... offers a system-level explanation of organizational emergence, structure, and survival that is largely independent of decision making at the micro level... Yet it is precisely this independence of a distinct model of choice that ultimately renders it compatible with the individualistic theories of both Coase and Simon...."