Academics From Austria

"[W]e have been forced to put a major emphasis on the acquisition of technical knowledge."

"[I]n a free society each individual has a responsibility towards the beliefs of his society—a responsibility on which all the rights and duties of citizenship are founded."

"It is not enough for the economist in a free society to be a good economic craftsman; he must also think and act as a citizen."

"[A] totalitarian country... has a much greater freedom of political action and can use whatever policies seem expedient regardless of their moral or philosophical implications. ...[T]here is nothing weaker than a free society which no longer believes strongly enough in the principles on which it is founded to base a living faith on them, but still believes strongly enough in them to be unable to act contrary to them; for such a society will be paralyzed. ...But ...nothing is stronger than a free society which is conscious of its beliefs and vigorous in its adherence to them. For such a society possesses a moral strength and dignity and inspires a loyalty among its members which are invincible."

"To eliminate depressions we must distribute capital investment... to eliminate the collapse of producer goods during the slack years... through a taxation policy... funds... should be spread... by means of a fiscal policy which rewards the accumulation of capital funds to be used for employment-creating investments in slack years. ...At the same time we should be able to organize for a steady expansion of our economic activity. One way of doing this would be to organize systematically the satisfaction of such major unfulfilled needs as housing. ...The only thing we lack today is the organization necessary for the mass production and mass assembly of houses, which could easily by supplied either by large corporation or by local cooperatives. ...[T]he problem of full employment is primarily one of organizing the resources which we so amply possess. ...[I]t requires that rarest of all qualities, political imagination ..."

"[N]othing is easier to attain than full employment... All we would have to do, for instance, would be to continue a war-economy at no more, perhaps, than half its present level. Or we could adopt some sort of state socialism, under which the surplus resources... would be employed on non-economic projects, it makes... little difference what twentieth century equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids... so long as we do not use the surplus labor to produce ordinary economic goods. ...But we refuse to accept the kind of society to which either [a permanent war economy or state socialism] would lead. We demand more than a stable society, we demand a good society. Specifically, we demand of our economic system... that it produce goods... that add to the wealth... and... that these goods be produced... under... the free enterprise system."

"[C]hronic unemployment is a denial of citizenship, a destruction of the rationality of our society, and a sign that we are socially incapable of mastering our economic tools. Reasonably full employment... is... a prerequisite to internal stability. ...[F]ailure to stabilize our economy would be the most severe threat to international order."

"[C]ollaboration between... divergent systems is possible... only as long as both are stable. ...International security is ...based upon the internal political and social security of each of the Great Powers."

"[W]e are all learning fast that we have to respect each other's basic beliefs and institutions, however much we must dislike them. If there is one lesson to this war, it is that the attempt to impose one's own system on the world, such as was made by both the Germans and the Japanese, must end not only in total world-wide conflict, but in the defeat and destruction of the country that makes the attempt."

"Without... a subconscious unity, understanding of each other's behavior is difficult to attain. ...We have all ...had experience ...where someone from a different environment, a different region of the country, a different social group, perhaps a different country, behaves contrary to what we consider normal behavior ...In international affairs we have had a grotesque and tragic example of such failure to understand, and of its dangers, in Mr. Neville Chamberlain's profound belief that Hitler must react, think, and act like a successful British businessman; and it was probably Hitler's undoing that he expected the British and Americans to react and act in the "realistic" fashion of a Nazi boss."

"For if this country—or any other of the great powers—were to make its defense program a function of its domestic employment situation, it would become impossible to conduct a constructive and well-thought out foreign policy or to develop any lasting collaboration."

"Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death."

"If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression."

"There can... be no freedom if a man-made absolute is set up as the one and exclusive goal of human endeavor, or as the one and exclusive rule of individual or social conduct. The man-made absolute may be peace or war, economic progress or security, the Nordic Race or the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Each of these must destroy freedom if it is set up as The Absolute."

"There can be no freedom if one man or one group of men... is assumed... inherently perfect or perfectible. Its claim to perfection or perfectibility is a claim to absolute rule."

"[T]he basic decisions are... about aims... what is desirable... the greater good or the lesser evil in the case of conflicting aims... what sacrifice we are willing to make for a certain achievement, and at what point the sacrifice outweighs the advantages."

"[T]echnical questions... constitute the bulk of our daily problems... But to everyone there is one correct answer. What is correct today may be made incorrect tomorrow by an advance in our knowledge or experience or by changes in the facts; but at any given time and place there is one optimum... provable, measurable, demonstrable... [i.e.,] objectively correct. ...[T]hat means that the human will does not enter. Without human will, however, there is no choice... no freedom. The whole technical and scientific field, is... ethically neutral; and freedom, like all other basic values, is an ethical value."

"[F]reedom cannot be legislated into existence—though it can be legislated out of existence if the necessary minimum of free government is destroyed. ...[F]reedom rests upon beliefs and social institutions and not upon laws. ...[L]egislative enactment does not create or determine institutional structure, social beliefs and human nature."

"Freedom rests on ethical decisions. But the political sphere deals with power. ...Individually, power may well be the goal of personal ambition. But socially it is a servant; its organization is only a means to a social end. ...[P]ower distributes rank and determines relations within society; it is a means of internal organization. But the end of society is always an ethical purpose."

"The political and social conclusion from the freedom of the individual is self-government, self-government as a right and as a duty of the individual. If there is no individual decision in self-government, it is only a sham. But it is just as much a sham and a camouflage for tyranny if there is no individual responsibility. There must be active, responsible, and spontaneous participation of the individual in government as his government, in its decisions as his decisions, in its burdens as his burdens. Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions—as in moral truth and accountability they are."

"Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society--its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions."

"We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny."

"Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government..."

"In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power."

"No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate."

"[T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a "Stalinist conspiracy," but because there was no other possibility."

"Actually, the specter of the Russo-German alliance is already the nightmare of every European government, however much they protest their belief in the inevitability of a Russo-German war. And what is only a nightmare today may be reality tomorrow. The two regimes will have to come together because they are similar ideologically and socially. That the European Left has not dared to admit this is understandable. By conceding that Soviet Russia is as fascist a state as Germany, they would have conceded that socialism must fail and would have abandoned themselves."

"Those German businessmen and industrialists, who, lured by the denunciation of fascism as antisocialist, concluded that it must be procapitalist, have since learned the better. But whereas originally the Right in France and England favored resistance to fascism, the slogan of the inevitable Russo-German war has made a large section favor the fascist advance, so that ‘both monsters devour each other.’"

"[T]he Western European democracies... will be forced into totalitarianism unless they produce a noneconomic society striving for the freedom and equality of the individual."

"The regimentation of agriculture was in both fascist countries the first, and for a considerable time the most drastic, intervention in the free play of economic forces. In either country, and especially in Germany, the threat of the industrial revolution in agriculture had reached a point at which government intervention in the social structure of farming was entirely unavoidable."

"There is a definite trend in Italy and Germany to eliminate profit participation and the ownership rights of nonmanaging partners and shareholders."

"In addition, profits are so completely subordinated in Germany and Italy to requirements of a militarily conceived national interest and of full employment that the maintenance of the profit principle is purely theoretical. Profits have lost their autonomy as an independent, not to say the supreme, goal of economic activity."

"[The masses] … must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason."

"With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe."

"There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know."

"Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior..."

"Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society."

"Equally striking is the fact that racial anti-Semitism was not taken seriously even by the great majority of Nazis. ‘It is just a catchword to attract voters’ was a standing phrase which everybody repeated and believed, and that I took it seriously was more than once regarded as definite proof of my stupidity and gullibility."

"[J]ustification of power must be the central problem. For it is through this problem alone that freedom and equality—or... justice—can be projected into the social and political reality... But to fascism the problem does not even exist except as a ridiculous relic of "Jewish liberalism.""

"Of these denials of European tradition one is especially important: that is the refutation of the demand that the political and social order and the authority set up under it have to justify themselves as benefiting their subjects. Hardly any other concept or idea of our past is held up to so much ridicule by fascism as that of the justification of power. ‘Power is its own justification’ is regarded as self-evident. Nothing shows better how far the totalitarian revolution has already gone than the general acceptance of this new maxim throughout Europe as a matter of course... [I]t is the most startling innovation. For the last two thousand years... justification of power and authority has been the central problem of European political thought and... political history. And since Europe became Christian there has never been any other approach... than... seeking justification in the benefit which the exercise of power confers upon its subjects... Not even the most fanatical advocates of absolute monarchy would have dared to justify the sovereign otherwise."

"The Nazi agitator whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants’ meeting: ‘We don’t want lower bread prices, we don’t want higher bread prices, we don’t want unchanged bread prices—we want National-Socialist bread prices,’ came nearer explaining fascism than anybody I have heard since."

"Of course, every revolution repudiates what went on before and considers itself a conscious break with the past; it is only posterity that sees, or imagines it sees, the historical continuity. Fascism, however, goes much further in its negation of the past than any earlier political movement, because it makes this negation its main platform. What is even more important, it denies simultaneously ideas and tendencies which are in themselves antithetic. It is antiliberal, but it is also anticonservative; antireligious and antiatheist; anticapitalist and antisocialist; antiwar and antipacifist..."

"[T]he ‘total state’ of fascism is not a political alignment within the existing political and social setup, but that it is a revolution which, like all revolutions, works from without."

"The most dangerous and at the same time most stupid explanation of fascism is the propaganda theory. In the first place, I have never been able to find anyone who could reconcile it with the fact that right up to the fascist victory—and in Italy beyond it—literally all means of propaganda were in the hands of uncompromising enemies of fascism. There was not one widely-read newspaper but poured ridicule on Hitler and Mussolini while the Nazi and the fascist press were unread and on the verge of bankruptcy. The radio in Germany, owned by the government, issued one anti-Nazi broadside after the other. More powerful than both, the established churches used all the enormous direct influence of the pulpit and the confessional to fight fascism and Nazism."

"As for the explanation that fascism is a last desperate attempt of capitalism to delay the socialist revolution, it simply is not true. It is not true that ‘big business’ promoted fascism. On the contrary, both in Italy and in Germany the proportion of fascist sympathizers and backers was smallest in the industrial and financial classes. It is equally untrue that ‘big business’ profits from fascism; of all the classes it probably suffers most from totalitarian economics and Wehrwirtschaft."

"This is a political book... It has a political purpose: to strengthen the will to maintain freedom against the threat of its abandonment in favor of totalitarianism."

"Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine."

"But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err."

"The completeness theorem, mathematically, is indeed an almost trivial consequence of Skolem 1923a. However, the fact is that, at that time, nobody (including Skolem himself) drew this conclusion (neither from Skolem 1923a nor, as I did, from similar considerations of his own)."

"The one man who was, during the last years, certainly by far Einstein's best friend, and in some ways strangely resembled him most, was Kurt Gödel, The great logician. They were very different in almost every personal way — Einstein gregarious, happy, full of laughter and common sense, and Gödel extremely solemn, very serious, quite solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a means of arriving at the truth. But they shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things."