Looking back at the early 20th century helps us to navigate our own tumultuous times
Book review: Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond (Oxford University Press) by Balázs Trencsényi
Ever the lover of fantasy, the English author and thinker H. G. Wells seemingly embraced the art of divination for his 1932 collection of essays, After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation. Its cover depicted Wells floating in a crystal ball and the essays inside ranged from “The World of Our Grandchildren” to “Crystal Gazing” – each suggesting the need to dissolve all nation states and create a global government, to overcome the political tensions of his time. The latter essay even predicted that if there were no further crises before 1 January 1933, “we shall have got through the worst.” It wasn’t to be. Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in late January 1933.
Wells’s essay is one particularly pertinent response to the turmoil of the interwar period used by Balázs Trencsényi in his new book, Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond. In encyclopaedic chapters, the Hungarian historian outlines the perceived crises of the years between the wars – from the crises of capitalism and democracy to what he calls the “crisis of the mind and spirit” – making the case that interwar intellectuals were conceptualising crises in novel and interlinked ways.
Trencsényi’s book is expansive in geographical scope, outlining the work of western, eastern, southeastern, southwestern and northern thinkers, and therefore de-centring western perspectives. He shows how interwar ideas – especially around the collapse of modernity, and the rise of populism and neoliberalism – can be useful to us today in thinking about our own crises, referencing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with the Covid-19 pandemic and oppression in his native Hungary. He also suggests the creative elements of crisis, asking whether the “emergence of the discourse of crisis signal[led] – and at the same time contribute[d] to – the radical transformation of modern political thinking and action”, and “the tragic developments of the twentieth century”.
One crisis was economic – especially given the effects of the Great Depression. Trencsényi considers known cognoscenti of capitalist calamity, including John Maynard Keynes, alongside lesser-known thinkers such as Ernst Wagemann, president of the Weimar-era Ministry of Economy’s Statistical Office, who similarly suggested the need for state intervention in the German context.
In France, however, the liberal economist Jacques Rueff argued the market had been disrupted by statist involvement during the war, and further collectivist political-economic ideas would spell new danger. Meanwhile, Jeno Varga, a Hungarian communist economist working for the Comintern, suggested technical innovation had generated unemployment – a theory that became known as “Varga’s law”, which the Soviet Union used to suggest the superiority of their non-capitalist modes of production.
Another related crisis was what Trencsényi calls the “crisis of the mind and spirit”: the transnational debate about the decline and regeneration of the “European mind” and European civilisation. The discourses around this crisis were not, as he points out, only promoted by renowned figures, like Oswald Spengler, who wrote about the deterioration of the west. They were also suggested by lesser-known figures across the political spectrum.
The French literary historian Paul Hazard’s Le Crise de la Conscience Européenne, 1680-1715 (“The crisis of the European conscience”), suggested the crisis was a shift in intellectual understanding, from civilisations based on duties to those based on rights. The Russian émigré sociologist Pitirim Sorokin had a very different analysis, that modernity was changing from a culture based on the material and empirical to one based on faith.
The Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki, meanwhile, proposed an idea of crisis that was neither conservative nor revolutionary, but saw fluidity as a key approach. He thought humans should creatively adapt to the world, and have “an openness to exchange and learning”. He proposed his native country as a leader in overcoming crises, arguing that Poland’s status as a new nation meant it had, by nature, to cooperate with other nations.
An interlinked crisis of society was also under discussion, drawing on demographic debates and ideas around the dysfunction of mass society after the collapse of peace and liberal capitalism, as explored by German economist Wilhelm Röpke.
Such themes, covering a wide variety of social and political perspectives, offer useful insights into the fears and hopes of the interwar generation – buffeted by conflict, economic collapse and the new challenges of the modern age. It is particularly noteworthy for its inclusion of detailed research into oft-overlooked regions of Europe.
Trencsényi’s book also poses lessons for our own times, with crisis discourses of the interwar era mirroring those of today around democracy, liberalism and identity. The Collins Dictionary, in fact, named “permacrisis” the word of the year in 2022. It explores how crisis discourses are often linked to authoritarian projects, but also suggests that they should be used as a self-critical practice, drawing attention to the ways in which the idea of crisis is mobilised by speakers to urge action, and encourage different perspectives.
The book does, at times, take a broad-brush approach, with “crisis” used alongside other, and not necessarily synonymic, terms, such as “clash”, “tension” and “rupture”. But Trencsényi’s underlying point – that considering how crises co-exist and relate to each other can help us to understand both others and ourselves – is, especially today, a necessary one.