Franz Borkenau (December 15, 1900 – May 22, 1957) was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Borkenau is known as one of the pioneers of the totalitarianism theory.
Youth Borkenau was born in Vienna, the son of Judge Rudolf Pollack and Melanie Fürth. Borkenau's father was born Jewish, but had converted to Roman Catholicism to improve his career prospects while his mother was Protestant. Borkenau was raised as a Catholic. Vienna was the capital of the vast multicultural and multiethnic Austrian empire that covered much of Eastern Europe, and Borkenau grew up in a cosmopolitan city that was full of various peoples. As a teenager, he became part of an youth subculture that was greatly influenced by the theories of psychoanalysis as promoted by Sigmund Freud and Freud's protégé Siegfried Bernfeld. After graduating from the Schottengymnasium in 1918, Borkenau was conscripted into the Austrian army. Borkenau was still in training at the time that the Austrian empire was defeated and the ancient House of Habsburg was deposed in October 1918.
As a student at the University of Vienna, he studied the law, history, economics and philosophy. As a student, he became convinced that the cause of the war that ended the Austrian empire was capitalism, which led him to become active in Communist groups. Borkenau was typical of the Austrian middle class who had enjoyed what the novelist Stefan Zweig called the "golden age of security" before 1914 and found the world that came about after 1918 to be as disorientating as it was disturbing, leading to a search for a new "anchor" ideology to provide certainty in a dangerous and uncertain world. Both of his parents disavowed him for embracing Communism. As a university student, he rose up to become chairman of the German Communist Students' League. Borkenau ended up transferring over to the University of Leipzig, where he was awarded a PhD in 1924. Borkenau's PhD thesis was on the Universal History, an 18th-century British universal history. Borkenau was always interested in devising grand theories that could explain everything that had happened in history, and believed that he had found such a theory in Marxism.
Communist In 1921, Borkenau joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was active as a Comintern agent until 1929.Jones, William David (July – September 1992). "Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau's Pareto", pp. 455–466. IN: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 53, Issue # 3, p. 457. After graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1924, Borkenau moved to Berlin. From 1925 to 1929, Borkenau worked as a research assistant for Jürgen Kuczynski at the Forschungsstelle für internationale Politik in Berlin, a think-tank that was sponsored by the German Communist Party. Both Borkenau and Kuczynski worked for the Hungarian Communist Eugen Varga, whose office at the Soviet embassy in Berlin was a conduit for the Comintern. In the 1920s, Borkenau was described by his friend Richard Löwenthal as a "sincere Marxist" who very much wanted a world revolution. Like other Marxists in Germany, Borkenau was disturbed by the failure as he saw it of the November Revolution of 1918, which had toppled the monarchy, but failed to replace capitalism with socialism. A major interest for Borkenau was in discovering the reasons why the November Revolution had failed to develop along Marxist lines, which led him to become involved in the Frankfurt School. At the end of 1929, Borkenau was expelled from both the Comintern and the KPD, owing to his personal repulsion and disgust about how the Communists operated, combined with an increasing horror about Stalinism. Borkenau then joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which he remained a member of until 1931 when he resigned.
In 1930, he began work on his Habilitationsschrift, a book entitled Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (The Transition from the Feudal to Bourgeois Interpretation of the World). Focusing on 17th-century Europe, Borkenau argued against the claims of Wilhelm Dilthey who maintained that the emergence of modern Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities) as university subjects was a process of transcending feudal ways of viewing the world. Taking a materialist line, Borkenau sought to link intellectual trends with the level of economic growth as he argued that no philosophy could be ahead of the levels of productive forces in a society.
In exile Despite his disillusionment with Communism, Borkenau remained a leftist and worked as a researcher for the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. During his time at the institute, Borkenau was a protégé of Carl Grünberg and his main interest was the relationship between capitalism and ideology. During 1933, Borkenau, who in Nazi terms was a "half-Jew", fled from Germany and lived at various times in Vienna, Paris and Panama City.
During the Austrian Civil War of 1934, Borkenau supported the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund against the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Borkenau tried to organise socialist resistance against the Dollfuss regime, but upon learning he was wanted by the Austrian police, fled to Paris. From 1934 to 1935, Borkenau lived in Paris, where he unsuccessfully sought an academic position. During the 1930s, Borkenau was involved with organizing aid from abroad for the clandestine group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings), which was working for the end of the Nazi regime. In a series of articles published during 1933–34 in the left-wing German language émigré press, Borkenau defended the Neu Beginnen group as the superior alternative to both the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Communist Party of Germany.
In 1935, he moved to London, where he befriended Bronisław Malinowski and unsuccessfully sought a position at the London School of Economics. The only academic post he was able to obtain was as a professor of sociology at the University of Panama. The pay was low, being only US$100 per month, and the tropical climate of Panama had a disastrous impact on Borkenau's health. In 1936, Borkenau moved back to London, where he worked as a journalist for a number of left-wing and liberal British newspapers.
In his 1936 biography of the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, Borkenau offered an early theory of totalitarianism from a Marxist perspective.Jones, William David (July – September 1992). "Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau's Pareto", pp. 455–466. IN: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 53, Issue #3, p. 461. Though rather hostile towards Pareto, Borkenau was much impressed by his theory of the "circulation of elites", by which the ablest individuals naturally became members of the elite, thereby ensuring that the elites would always be re-energized and refreshed.Jones, William David (July – September 1992). "Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau's Pareto", pp. 455–466. IN: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 53, Issue # 3, p. 459. Writing from a Marxist viewpoint, Borkenau contended that the "circulation of elites" theory explained both Communism and fascism.Jones, William David (July–September 1992). "Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau's Pareto", pp. 455–466. IN: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 53, Issue # 3, p. 460. Borkenau argued that the political, social and economic crises caused by World War I caused the strongest capitalists to form a "new economic elite". However, as the "new economic elite" continually revitalized itself by ever more destructive competition, more and more ordinary people felt the effects, thus causing the state to intervene. As the state became more involved with the economy, a "new political elite" emerged, which superseded the previous economic elite, and claimed total power for itself in both the economy and politics. In Borkenau's opinion, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany and Communism in Russia, all in different ways, represented the unfolding of the process. Borkenau argued that Vladimir Lenin created the first totalitarian dictatorship with all power concentrated into the hands of the state, which was completely unconstrained by any class forces as all previous regimes had been.
Spanish Civil War In August–September 1936, Borkenau made a two-month visit to Spain, where he observed the effects of Spanish Civil War in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. During his Spanish visit, Borkenau was much disillusioned by the behavior of the agents of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD in Spain and of the Spanish Communist Party.
During his first visit to Spain, Borkenau set out to dispute the picture of Spanish Republican women offered up by the British journalist Ferdinand Touchy, who wrote a photo-essay on 27 July 1936 in the conservative Daily Mail newspaper called "The Red Carmens, the women who burn churches". Touchy's essay featured a series of photos he had taken of Spanish women who had joined the Worker's Militia, and argued that for women to fight in the war was to reject their femininity, which for him was a most monstrous development. Touchy condemned the Spanish republic as amoral and "Godless". In an essay that has been widely condemned as misogynistic, Touchy argued that the right and proper role of a Spanish woman was to be a submissive housewife, devoted to obeying the Catholic church and her husband, and argued that the Spanish Republic deserved to lose the war because it preached gender equality. Touchy argued that the women serving in the Worker's Militia had engaged in all sorts of sexual "depravity", writing of his disgust about young women who engaged in premarital sex with both men and other women, which for him was the beginning of the end of "civilization" itself. Borkenau wrote a response to Touchy's article, which he called full of hysteria and inaccuracies, saying he had not seen the widespread "sexual depravity" that Touchy claimed to have witnessed. Borkenau wrote against Touchy that women serving in the Worker's Militia did not seem to be causing the sort of social breakdown that Touchy claimed it had, saying the society was being strained by the war, but it was holding up to the challenge. Borkenau further wrote that wars break down the traditional barriers of sexual morality, and noted that based on his own personal experiences of the Austrian empire in World War I that the sort of "sexual depravity" that Touchy claimed to have seen in Spain had been common in Vienna during World War I.