Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, War, Peace, and the Bomb

  • David E. Rowe &
  • Robert Schulmann
Princeton University Press: 2007. 560 pp. $29.95, £18.95 0691120943 | ISBN: 0-691-12094-3
Einstein takes up the sword against fascism in this 1933 cartoon from the Brooklyn Eagle. Credit: C. R. MACAULEY

As a German Jew who rose to be the most celebrated scientist since Newton, a pacifist triggered by the rise of Hitler to recommend the development of the atomic bomb, a cosmopolite driven by the fate of his people to support a Jewish nation state, or as an émigré to America who supported socialist ideas in the time of McCarthyism, Einstein was often at the centre of clashing ideologies. A solitary individual who became trapped by the limelight of the world stage, Einstein was reluctantly forced to become an activist. Thus, Einstein on Politics is a goldmine for readers interested in Einstein as an engaged intellectual of his era.

Editors David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann have done an excellent job of collecting, thematically assembling and historically contextualizing Einstein's private letters and public statements on the great political issues of his time. The book is also a fascinating record of Einstein's private thoughts and public stance on the reception of the relativity revolution. Included here are his reaction to the virulent anti-Semitic, anti-relativity German scientists, his tortured relations with the Prussian Academy of Sciences after the rise of the Nazis and his later expressed identification with Galileo for his struggle “to overcome the anthropocentric and mythical thinking of his contemporaries and to lead them back to an objective and causal attitude towards the cosmos”.

Einstein's statement in 1921 that “my Zionism does not preclude cosmopolitan views” could serve as the motto for the vast sections in this book documenting his engagement with the fate of Jews. His efforts to reconcile his cosmopolitanism and Zionism found particularly clear expression in his deep engagement with the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. Einstein regarded a Hebrew university as a vital part of a Jewish renaissance in Palestine and also as a necessary place for gifted Jewish youths barred by anti-Semitism from many European universities. Whereas the inclusion of 'Hebrew' in the name of the university implied a commitment to creating a Jewish home, Einstein had great faith in the mission of the university as an international academic institution. In a statement in March 1925, Einstein insisted that “Jewish nationalism is today a necessity” and that, together with other educational institutions, the Hebrew University should regard it as one of its “noblest tasks to keep our people free from nationalistic obscurantism and aggressive intolerance”.

This book also includes fascinating documentation of Einstein's private and public responses to the rise of Nazism, in the course of which he forged an influential exemplar of the morally engaged twentieth-century intellectual. Collaborating with other prominent activists such as Romaine Rolland, Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell, he continually expressed his hope that the principles taught by great Germans such as Kant and Goethe would some day “prevail in public life and the general consciousness”. This goal required that scientists and other intellectuals would assume public responsibility as advocates of tolerance, rational discourse, non-violence and other humanistic values. Provoked by the accusation from the Prussian Academy that his public statements against fascism constituted “atrocity-mongering against the German people”, Einstein insisted on the moral responsibility of intellectuals to speak out against violent nationalism. When urged by the German physicist Max Von Laue to exercise some restraint, he responded “Does not such restraint signify a lack of responsibility? Where would we be had men like Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Voltaire and Humboldt thought and behaved in such a fashion?”

Einstein's impact on the relations between science, politics and freedom, however, transcends his record as a public intellectual. Ironically, the unintended wider cultural legacy of his physics worked against his commitment to democratic values and his faith in the mission of scientists to publicly combat violence and irrational politics.

In a letter to Rolland in August 1917, Einstein insisted that “only facts can dissuade the majority of the misled from their delusion”. But Einstein's concept of facts, as expressed in his exchange with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, was rather esoteric. Failing to appreciate the importance of common-sense realism as the basis of democratic public discourse, he did not seem to anticipate that the shift from newtonian to einsteinian physics would widen the gap between authoritative scientific knowledge and lay opinion. His liberal-democratic commitment was contradicted by his view that “naive realism”, the belief that “things 'are' as they are perceived by us through our senses”, was a “plebian illusion”. Deeply concerned about the turning of the public into a herd in the country of Kant and Goethe, he also failed to see that the public in democratic societies is not exactly moved by rational arguments free from rhetoric and theatricality.

In the final analysis, when Einstein thought or spoke about democracy, he seemed to have focused on conditions for the freedom and creativity of the individual rather than the group. Hence, much more important than all the things he said and wrote was his personal example as a scientist. By demonstrating the powers of one person's mind to revolutionize the view of the cosmos, Einstein reaffirmed the value of free individual thinking in resisting group-mind and coerced opinion — and therefore sustained the possibility that the majority could be wrong.