Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (75 page)

All this was new for most biologists in 1943, but Schrödinger went further, to infer that the gene must consist of a long, highly stable molecule that contains a code. He compared this code to the Morse code, in the sense that even a small number of basic units would provide great diversity.
⁵⁷
Schrödinger was thus the first person to use the term
code,
and it was this, and the fact that physics had something to say about biology, that attracted the attention of biologists and made his lectures and subsequent book so influential.
⁵⁸
On the basis of his reasoning, Schrödinger concluded that the gene must be ‘a large protein molecule, in which every atom, every radical, every heterocyclic ring, plays an individual role.’
⁵⁹
The chromosome, he said, is a message written in code. Ironically, just as Schrödinger’s basic contribution was the application of the new physics to biology, so he himself was unaware that, at the very time his lectures were delivered, Oswald Thomas Avery, across the Atlantic at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, was discovering that ‘the transforming principle’ at the heart of the gene was not a protein but deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
⁶⁰

When he came to convert his lectures into a book, Schrödinger added an epilogue. Even as a young man, he had been interested in Vedanta, the Hindu doctrine, and in the epdogue he considered the question – central to Hindu thought – that the personal self is identical with the ‘all-comprehending universal self.’ He admitted that this was both ‘ludicrous and blasphemous’ in Christian thought but still believed the idea was worth advancing. This was enough to cause the Catholic Dublin publishing house that was considering releasing the lectures in print to turn its back on Schrödinger, even though the text had already been set in type. The title was released instead by Cambridge University Press a year later, in 1944.

Despite the epilogue, the book proved very influential; it is probably the most important work of biology written by a physicist. Timing also had something to do with the book’s influence: not a few physicists were turned off their own subject by the development of the atomic bomb. At any rate, among those who read
What Is Life?
and were excited by its arguments were
Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins. What they did with Schrödinger’s ideas is considered in a later chapter.

Intellectually speaking, the most significant consequence of World War II was that science came of age. The power of physics, chemistry, and the other disciplines had been appreciated before, of course. But radar, Colossus, and the atomic bomb, not to mention a host of lesser discoveries – like operational research, new methods of psychological assessment, magnetic tape, and the first helicopters – directly affected the outcome of the war, much more so than the scientific innovations (such as the IQ test) in World War I. Science was itself now a – or perhaps
the —
colossus in affairs. Partly as a result of that, whereas the earlier war had been followed by an era of pessimism, World War II, despite the enormous shallow of the atomic bomb, was followed by the opposite mood, an optimistic belief that science could be harnessed for the benefit of ad. In time this gave rise to the idea of The Great Society.

It was perhaps only natural that a war in which very different regimes were pitched against one another should bring about a reassessment of the way men govern themselves. Alongside the scientists and generals and code breakers trying to outwit the enemy, others devoted their energies to the no less fundamental and only marginally less urgent matter of the rival merits of fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. This brought about one of the more unusual coincidences of the century, when a quartet of books was published during the war by exiles from that old dual monarchy, Austria and Hungary, looking forward to the type of society man should aim for after hostilities ceased. Whatever their other differences, these books had one thing in common to recommend them: thanks to the wartime paper rationing, they were all mercifully short.

The first of these,
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
by Joseph Schumpeter, appeared in 1942, but for reasons that will become apparent, it suits us to consider first
Karl Mannheim
’s
Diagnosis of Our Time,
which appeared a year later.
¹
Mannheim was a member of the Sunday Circle who had gathered around George Lukács in Budapest during World War I, and included Arnold Hauser and Béla Bartók. Mannheim had left Hungary in 1919, studied at Heidelberg, and attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg. He was professor of sociology at Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933, a close colleague of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and the others, but after Hitler took power, he moved to London, teaching at the LSE and the Institute of Education. He also became editor of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, a large series of books published by George Routledge and whose authors included Harold Lasswell, professor of political science at Chicago, E. F. Schumacher, Raymond Firth, Erich Fromm, and Edward Shils.

Mannheim took a
‘planned
society’ completely for granted. For him the old capitalism, which had produced the stock market crash and the depression, was dead. ‘All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.’
²
At the same time he was equally disillusioned with Stalinism and fascism. Instead, according to him, the new society after the war, what he called the Great Society, could be
achieved only by a form of planning that did not destroy freedom, as had happened in the totalitarian countries, but which took account of the latest developments in psychology and sociology, in particular psychoanalysis. Mannheim believed that society was ill – hence ‘Diagnosis’ in his title. For him the Great Society was one where individual freedoms were maintained, but informed by an awareness of how societies operated and how modern, complex, technological societies differed from peasant, agricultural communities. He therefore concentrated on two aspects of contemporary society: youth and education, on the one hand, and religion on the other. Whereas the Hitler Youth had become a force of conservatism, Mannheim believed youth was naturally progressive if educated properly.
³
He thought pupils should grow up with an awareness of the sociological variations in society, and the causes of them, and that they should also be made aware of psychology, the genesis of neurosis, how this affects society, and what role it might play in the alleviation of social problems. He concentrated the last half of his book on religion because he saw that at bottom the crisis facing the Western democracies was a crisis of values, that the old class order was breaking down but was yet to be replaced by anything else systematic or productive. While he saw the church as part of the problem, he believed that religion was still, with education, the best way to instil values, but that organised religion had to be modernised – again, with theology being reinforced by sociology and psychology. Mannheim was thus
for
planning, in economics, education, and religion, but by this he did not imply coercion or central control. He simply thought that postwar society would be much more informed about itself than prewar society.
⁴
He did acknowledge that socialism had a tendency to centralise power and degenerate into mere control mechanisms, but he was a great Anglophile who thought that Britain’s ‘unphilosophical and practically-minded citizens’ would see off would-be dictators.

Joseph Schumpeter had little time for sociology or psychology. For him, insofar as they existed at all, they were subordinate to economics. In his wartime book
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
he sought to change thinking about economics no less than John Maynard Keynes had done.
⁵
Schumpeter was firmly opposed to Keynes, and to Marx as wed, and it is not hard to see why. Born in Austria in 1883, the same year as Keynes, he was educated at the Theresianum, an exclusive school reserved for the sons of the aristocracy.
⁶
Schumpeter was there by virtue of the fact that his mother had remarried a general after his father, an undistinguished man, had died. As a result of his ‘elevation,’ Schumpeter was always rather self-consciously aristocratic; he would appear at university meetings in riding habit and inform anyone who was listening that he had three ambitions in life – to be a great lover, a great horseman, and a great economist. After university in Vienna (during its glorious period, covered earlier in this book), he became economic adviser to a princess in Egypt, returning to a professorship in Austria after he had published his first book. After World War I he was invited to become finance minister in the newly formed centre-socialist government, and though he worked out a plan to stabilise the currency, he soon resigned and became president of a private
bank. In the debacle after Versailles the bank faded. Eventually, Schumpeter made his way to Harvard, ‘where his manner and his cloak quickly made him into a campus figure.’
⁷
All his life he believed in elites, ‘an aristocracy of talent.’

Schumpeter’s main thesis was that the capitalist system is essentially static: for employers and employees as well as for customers, the system settles down with no profit in it, and there is no wealth for investment. Workers receive just enough for their labour, based on the cost of producing and selling goods. Profit, by implication, can only come from innovation, which for a limited time cuts the cost of production (until competitors catch up) and allows a surplus to be used for further investment. Two things followed from this. First, capitalists themselves are not the motivating force of capitalism, but instead entrepreneurs who invent new techniques or machinery by means of which goods are produced more cheaply. Schumpeter did not think that entrepreneurship could be taught, or inherited; it was, he believed, an essentially ‘bourgeois’ activity. What he meant by this was that, in any urban environment, people would have ideas for innovation, but who had those ideas, when and where they had them, and what they did with them was unpredictable. Bourgeois people acted not out of any theory or philosophy but for pragmatic self-interest. This flatly contradicted Marx’s analysis. The second element of Schumpeter’s outlook was that profit, as generated by entrepreneurs, was temporary.
⁸
Whatever innovation was introduced would be followed up by others in that sector of industry or commerce, and a new stability would eventually be achieved. This meant that for Schumpeter capitalism was inevitably characterised by cycles of boom and stagnation.
⁹
As a result, his view of the 1930s was diametrically opposite to Keynes’s. Schumpeter thought that the depression was to an extent inevitable, a cold, realistic
douche.
By wartime he had developed doubts that capitalism could survive. He thought that, as a basically bourgeois activity, it would lead to increasing bureaucratisation, a world for ‘men in lounge suits’ rather than buccaneers. In other words, it contained the seeds of its own ultimate failure; it was an economic success but not a sociological success.
¹⁰
Moreover, in embodying a competitive world, capitalism bred in people an almost endemic critical approach that in the end would be turned on itself. At the same time (1942), he thought socialism could work, though for him socialism was a benign, bureaucratic, planned economy rather than full-blooded Marxism or Stalinism.
¹¹

If Mannheim took planning for granted in the postwar world, and if Schumpeter was lukewarm about it, the third Austro-Hungarian, Friedrich von Hayek, was downright hostile. Born in 1899, Hayek came from a family of scientists, distantly related to the Wittgensteins. He took two doctorates at the University of Vienna, becoming professor of economics at the LSE in 1931, and acquired British citizenship in 1938. He too loathed Stalinism and fascism equally, but he was much less convinced than the others that the same centralising and totalitarian tendencies that existed in Russia and Germany couldn’t extend eventually to Britain and even America. In
The Road to Serfdom
(1944), also published by George Routledge, he set out his opposition to planning and
linked freedom firmly to the market, which, he thought, helped produce a ‘spontaneous social order.’ He was critical of Mannheim, regarded Keynesian economics as ‘an experiment’ that, in 1944, had yet to be proved, and reminded his readers that democracy was not an end in itself but ‘essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom.’
¹²
He acknowledged that the market was less than perfect, that one shouldn’t make a fetish of it, but again reminded his readers that the rule of law had grown up at the same time as the market, and in part as a response to its shortcomings: the two were intertwined achievements of the Enlightenment.
¹³
His reply to Mannheim’s point about the importance of having greater sociological knowledge was that markets are ‘blind,’ producing effects that no one can predict, and that that is part of their point, part of their contribution to freedom, the ‘invisible hand’ as it has been called. For him, therefore, planning was not only wrong in principle but impractical. Von Hayek then went on to produce three reasons why, under planning, ‘the worst get on top.’ The first was that the more highly educated people are always those who can see through arguments and don’t join the group or agree to any hierarchy of values. Second, the centraliser finds it easier to appeal to the gullible and docile; and third, it is always easier for a group of people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of foreigners or a different class, say – than on a positive one. He attacked historians like E. H. Carr who aimed to present history as a science (as indeed did Marx), with a certain inevitability about it, and he attacked science itself, in the person of C. H. Waddington, author of
The Scientific Attitude,
which had predicted that the scientific approach would soon be applied to politics.
¹⁴
For Hayek, science in that sense was a form of planning. Among the weaknesses of capitalism, he conceded that the tendency to monopoly needed to be watched, and guarded against, but he saw a greater practical threat from the monopolies of the labour unions under socialism.

As the war was ending, a fourth Austro-Hungarian released
The Open Society and Its Enemies.
¹⁵
This was Karl Popper. Popper’s career had an unusual trajectory. Born in Vienna in 1902, he did not enjoy good health as a young man, and in 1917 a lengthy illness kept him away from school. He flirted with socialism, but Freud and Adler were deeper influences, and he attended Einstein’s lectures in Vienna. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, then worked as a social worker with children abandoned after World War I, and as a teacher. He came into contact with the Vienna Circle, especially Herbert Feigl and Rudolf Carnap, and was encouraged to write. His first books,
The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge
and
Logik der Forschung
(The Logic of Scientific Discovery), attracted enough attention for him to be invited to Britain in the mid-1930s for two long lecture tours. By then the mass emigration of Jewish intellectuals had begun, and when, in 1936, Moritz Schlick was assassinated by a Nazi student, Popper, who had Jewish blood, accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He arrived there in 1937 and spent most of World War II in the calm and relative isolation of his new home. It was in the Southern Hemisphere that he produced his next two books,
The Poverty of Historicism
and
The Open Society
and Its Enemies,
many of the arguments of the former title being included in
The Open Society.
¹⁶
Popper shared many of the views of his fellow Viennese exile Friedrich von Hayek, but he did not confine himself to economics, ranging far more widely.

The immediate spur to
The Open Society
was the news of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. The longer-term inspiration arose from the ‘pleasant sensation’ Popper felt on arriving for the first time in England, ‘a country with old liberal traditions,’ as compared with a country threatened with National Socialism, which for him was much more like the original closed society, the primitive tribe or feudal arrangement, where power and ideas are concentrated in the hands and minds of a few, or even one, the king or leader: ‘It was as if the windows had been suddenly opened.’ Popper, like the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, was profoundly affected by the scientific method, which he extended to politics. For him, there were two important ramifications. One was that political solutions were like scientific ones – they ‘can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvement.’ This is what he meant by the poverty of historicism, the search for deep lessons from a study of history, which would provide the ‘iron laws’ by which society should be governed.
¹⁷
Popper thought there was no such thing as history, only historical interpretation. Second, he thought that the social sciences, if they were to be useful, ‘must be capable of making prophecies.’ But if that were the case, again historicism would work, and human agency, or responsibility, would be reduced and perhaps eliminated. This, he thought, was nonsense. He ruled out the very possibility that there could be ‘theoretical history’ as there was theoretical physics.
¹⁸