Alliance System

Alliance System

Alliances are a common military or political action among states. Often resorted to for defensive purposes, they frequently result in the very war they hoped to avoid. When Sparta formed the Peloponnesian League and Athens led the Delian League in the aftermath of the Persian War, war followed, and it was long and costly. Likewise, the alliance system that emerged in the years before World War I proved to be a major cause of one of the greatest conflagrations in human history.

The roots of the modern alliance system lie in the situation that arose following the victory of Prussia in its war with France in 1870–71. Since the 1860s the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck had waged wars with Denmark and Austria, which led to territorial acquisitions.

With the Franco-Prussian War came the unification of Germany, which then took two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, from France. One of the major consequences of these events was a change in the balance of power as Germany replaced France as Europe's greatest nation.

German diplomats assessed these new conditions. The first point to be noted was that France constituted a threat on Germany's western border, eager as it was to retrieve the lost territories. Thus, in the 1880s, Bismarck sought to isolate France and prevent it from obtaining another ally that could pose a danger to Germany in the east and thus produce the possibility of a two-front war against Germany in the future.

With this in mind, Bismarck devised the Three Emperors' League in 1873, which tied together the conservative empires of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Even after signing the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, he attempted to contain Russia in the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887.

Following Bismarck's removal from office in 1890, Germany allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse, as it appeared that Russia and Austria-Hungary were incompatible partners. Russian ambitions in the Balkans, fanned by Pan-Slavism, came into conflict with Austria-Hungary's need to control these areas for the sake of its own national integrity.

Thus, Russia was motivated to sign a treaty with France in 1894 to gain its assistance in the east. This created the possibility of a two-front war for Germany. It should also be noted that both France and Germany found themselves linked to eastern powers whose quarrel did not directly involve their national interests.

In these circumstances, it was natural for Britain to be taken into consideration, despite the fact that Britain had a history of maintaining its distance from the continent and eschewing treaties. From the German point of view, there were two positive scenarios.

The first would be for Britain to maintain neutrality; the second and best option would be for Britain to become a German partner. At the same time Russia and France hoped that Britain would become an ally and add British naval strength to their arsenal of weapons. The contest for British support was to become one of the most important issues around the turn of the century.

Germany made critical mistakes in dealing with Britain. In the first place, they seem to have believed that Germany needed to do nothing to woo Britain, for eventually Britain would be forced to side with Germany because of the former's differences with France and Russia. There was a tradition of war with both, and Britain had important rivalries with France in Africa and Russia over India and Afghanistan.

This turned out to be a serious miscalculation on Germany's part since Britain, having been embarrassed by the unexpected difficulty of the Boer War, was anxious to achieve security. What truly alarmed Britain was the German decision to adopt a program to create a high seas fleet. Britain had always depended on its naval supremacy to be its most important defense and to secure its communications with the empire.

The idea that Germany would challenge its predominance spurred Britain to embark on its own naval building program, resulting in a naval race. More significantly, it prompted Britain, to the surprise of Germany, to reconsider its isolation and enter into conversations with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907. Both concluded in the resolution of their colonial differences and the inauguration of military contacts.

What had occurred was not an alliance between the three; rather, Britain had established friendly relations with the other two. Thus, this relationship became known as the the Triple Entente.

This outcome, of course, now forced Germany to plan not only for a two-front war but for a war in which Britain might intervene on the side of its opponents. Moreover, it now became clear that Italy, the third member of the Triple Alliance, could not be counted on to support Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The result of all of this was the development of the Schlieffen Plan, by which Germany hoped to score a decisive victory over Russia and France before Britain could intervene. This plan committed Germany to a timetable that was very hard to alter once a decision was made. Thus, it led to the violation of Belgian neutrality, which assured that Britain would come to Belgium's assistance.

The crisis in the Balkans caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 led to a confrontation between Russia and Austria-Hungary over Serbia. Faithful to its treaty commitments, France supported Russia, while Germany backed Austria-Hungary.

When German armies entered Belgium, Britain entered the war. The alliance system ensured that a chain reaction would take place as countries arrayed themselves against each other. In many ways it provoked the war it was intended to prevent.

Analytic Philosophy

Analytic Philosophy

Since its beginnings in ancient Greece, one of the motivations driving Western philosophy has been the conviction that concepts such as "knowledge," "mind," "justice," and "beauty" are obscure and that it is the business of philosophers to achieve a clearer understanding of their meanings.

Analytic philosophy seeks this elevated understanding through a clarification of "ordinary," that is, nonphilosophical, language that is believed by most analytic philosophers to be vague and obscure, at least in regard to concepts of interest to philosophers.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the founders of the analytic tradition, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, sought to use newly developed techniques in symbolic logic to produce ideally simple "atomic statements," the meanings of whose component terms were absolutely clear.

These component terms would, they believed, directly match, or, to use Wittgenstein's term, "picture," "atomic facts," thereby yielding absolutely certain truths about "reality." Russell called this technique "logical atomism." During the 1920s and 1930s, this methodology, especially as embodied in Wittgenstein's book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, inspired the short-lived analytic movement known as logical positivism.

In this view science represents the standard of what is to count as knowledge, and, positivists claimed, science itself ultimately rests on statements of the sort sought by Russell and Wittgenstein, namely, simple statements the truth or falsehood of which can be verified, in principle, by direct sensory experience.

Utterances that cannot be analyzed and verified in this way, for example, those containing religious or ethical terms, were dismissed by logical positivists as meaningless, or at the very least as outside the boundaries of possible knowledge.

Though Russell never lost faith in some form of "logical analysis" as the proper approach to the solution of philosophical problems, over time most philosophers in the analytic tradition, including the logical positivists, came to doubt the feasibility of arriving at absolutely clear and simple statements whose truth could be conclusively verified by basic sensory experiences.

Wittgenstein also began to question his own "picture theory" of language. Later in his life he authored a radical critique not only of his and Russell's earlier work, but of virtually all of previous philosophy and in the process inspired a second movement within the analytic tradition, one that came to be known as ordinary language philosophy.

Through the presentation of extensive "reminders" about how concepts actually function in "ordinary" language, the later Wittgenstein sought to wean philosophers away from the perception that our ordinary concepts are obscure and in need of philosophical analysis and clarification.

With regard to our familiar concepts, Wittgenstein claimed that "nothing is hidden." A concept's meaning, he said, is fully visible in the ways in which it is used in ordinary language.

If we remind ourselves of how words such as knowledge, mind, and the rest are used in the push and pull of life, he argued, we can see all there is to see about what they mean. The outcome of this realization should then be that philosophers' traditional problems are not solved, but dissolved, that is, shown not to have been genuine problems in the first place.

In spite of the widespread influence in the mid-20th century of this critique of the need for philosophical analysis, philosophers' faith in the legitimacy and profound urgency of their ancient puzzles reasserted itself, and it has for the most part prevailed, at least for the foreseeable future.

The vast majority of analytic philosophers are today fully engaged in attempts to "shed light" on concepts of traditional philosophical interest, though without resorting to the kind of rigorous, but discredited, logical analysis envisioned by Russell and Wittgenstein in the early decades of the 20th century.

Comintern

Comintern logo

During its existence (1919–43) the Third International, or Communist International (Comintern), was an umbrella organization of the world's Communist Parties. Its stated mission was to coordinate all Communist activities independent of the Soviet Union.

In time, however, the Comintern was made to serve the objectives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, thus, the goals of the Soviet Union. Placing its headquarters in Moscow reinforced this process.

The Comintern came into being in March 1919 in response to what Lenin perceived as a critical need. The socialists who had gathered under the framework of what was known as the Second International were undisciplined.

Several of the socialist parties in the various nations had supported their nations' entry into World War I and continued to support that effort. These socialist parties were thus seen as supporting bourgeois institutions rather than advancing the socialist cause.


Having just completed the first stages of seizing the Russian government and beginning a civil war that would last for another four years, Lenin and the Russian Communists believed that socialists must be devoted to worldwide revolution with their actions according to a prescribed party line. That line was defined by what were known as the 21 Points. Any Communist Party had to obey all of these directives in order to become part of the Third International.

The 21 Points included the requirements for member organizations to take the name Communist Party while removing members who did not accept the points, to subscribe to the philosophy of liberating colonies, to use the combination of both illegal and legal methods (as required), to change its internal rules to conform to Comintern policy, and to obey all Comintern directives. These points were drafted by Lenin in combination with the Comintern's first head, Gregory Zinoviev.

The Second Congress of the Comintern was held in 1920, with subsequent congresses in 1921, 1922, 1924, 1928, and 1935. Membership included the Communist Parties of Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, Czechsolovakia, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, the United States, Yugoslavia, and the parties of Japan and various Asian and South American Nations.

The official language of the organization at the beginning was German. Significantly, by the 1930s Russian became the official language. The Comintern was organized into several departments: Cadres (which maintained files on all members and worked very closely with NKVD, the secret police), Propaganda and Mass Organization, Administration of Affairs, Translation, Archives, and Communications. While not stated, one of the most important functions of the Comintern was to gather information that was then sent to Soviet intelligence organizations.

Comintern poster

The leaders of the Comintern's national sections were the individuals leading various national parties in the interwar period. Those who survived the purges of the 1930s and World War II became the leaders of the Eastern European states that became Communist in the aftermath of the war.

These included George Dimitrov, head of the Comintern from 1935 to 1943 and leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party; László Rajk and Mátyás Rákosi of Hungary; Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia; and many in the mid to higher levels of the new Communist governments.

This international staff were regarded by the Soviets with great suspicion. In the period of the purges (the second half of the 1930s), many Comintern staff disappeared. The most prominent of those arrested was Béla Kun, who had led the Hungarian Soviet in 1919, but many others perished as well.


The height of this purge of foreigners was in the years 1937 to 1938, after which it eased significantly. Maintenance of party discipline was extremely important, and directives concerning activities, organization, and other changes were conveyed from this headquarters to all of the Communist Parties.

Even when Communist Parties were banned and had to go underground (as happened in Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Yugoslavia), they still had to report to Moscow. Comintern activities also included funding the parties.

Up until 1935 and the Seventh Comintern Congress the Comintern was opposed to cooperation with other socialist parties. Then the policy shifted with fascism being defined as the enemy. In addition to the Comintern's support of the popular fronts, its most significant effort was creating an army to fight for the republic in the Spanish civil war.

The Comintern recruited, transported, and organized (politically as well as militarily) the volunteers who would form the International Brigades. Over 30,000 volunteers would be sent to Spain in this effort.

In 1939 the Soviet Union and Germany signed a nonaggression pact. From the beginning of World War II in September 1939 until the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, the war was referred to as an imperialist conflict, and members of the Comintern were told not to oppose the fascists.

During the interwar period the Comintern (as well as communism and the Soviet Union in general) was feared by nearly all nations. The Comintern was regarded as the international arm of the Soviet Union. It was for this reason that to please his Western allies it was disbanded in 1943 on Stalin's orders. It revived in another form in 1947 as the Communist Bureau of Information (Cominform). Cominform's function was the same as the Comintern: to extend control over all international Communist Parties; it was abolished in 1956.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Perhaps the most significant individual of the 20th century, Albert Einstein's contributions to science reshaped physics in ways that continue to be explored and led to the development of atomic energy and the atomic bomb.

A nonobservant German Jew, he was a late bloomer as a student, showing slow language development. Although folklore claims Einstein was a poor math student, he had a knack for mechanics and geometry at an early age, teaching himself geometry and calculus from a copy of Euclid's Elements.

Any reputation he may have had as a poor student came from his dissatisfaction with the curriculum at the German gymnasiums; at age 16 he left school, failed his university entrance exam for the Federal Polytechnic Institute (FPI), and took steps toward formulating his theories of relativity.


He was accepted at the FPI the following year and four years after that was granted a teaching position. His first published paper, "Consequences on the Observations of Capillarity Phenomena," hinted at his hopes for universal physical laws, binding principles that would govern all of physics.

When he graduated FPI, he took a job as a patent clerk and continued to work on scientific papers in his spare time. Four such papers were published in the Annalen der Physik journal in 1905, each of them major contributions to the shape of modern physics. Today they are called the "Annus Mirabilis" ("Extraordinary Year") papers.

The Annus Mirabilis papers concerned the photoelectric effect; Brownian motion, Einstein's treatment of which helped provide more evidence for the existence of atoms; matter and energy equivalence, the paper that included Einstein's equation E=mc2; and special relativity, which contradicted Newtonian physics by stipulating the speed of light as a constant.

The importance of these papers cannot be overstated—they continue to be relevant to physicists today, and the photoelectric effect paper had a huge effect on the development of quantum mechanics and earned Einstein a Nobel Prize.

It was during the war years that Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity, more radical than his special relativity. The general relativity theory replaces that most basic and intuitive of concepts from Enlightenment physics, Newtonian gravity, with the Einstein field equation.

Under general relativity there is no ether or constant frame of reference, and gravity is reduced simply to an effect of curving space-time. Because of World War I, Einstein's writings were not readily available to the rest of the world, but by war's end general relativity became a controversial topic.

Einstein's importance to the scientific field of his day was assured when journals reported that experiments conducted during a 1919 solar eclipse confirmed general relativity's predictions about the bending of starlight in contradiction to the effects demanded by Newtonian models.

Throughout the next two decades Einstein sparred in papers and debates with other scientists, particularly about quantum theory, which he viewed as an inherently incomplete model of physical reality and hence an incorrect one. When the Nazis came to power, he was working at Princeton University in the United States, where he remained after renouncing his German citizenship.

Fearing the Germans would develop nuclear weapons, Einstein wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advising the research and testing of fission bombs, a suggestion that led to the United States's Manhattan Project, the outcome of which was the development of the first atomic bomb and its use to end the war in the Pacific.

Einstein continued to search for a "unified field theory" that would describe all physical laws in one theory, the quest that had driven everything from his capillarity paper to his theory of general relativity. He lived a quiet life, refusing the request of the government of Israel that he serve as its president, and died in 1955 of an aneurysm.

Eugenics

Eugenics

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term and concept of eugenics in 1883. Eugenics, often defined as "well-born," was an effort to apply Darwinian evolution and Gregor Mendel's recently recognized genetic discoveries to the physical, mental, and moral improvement of human beings.

Eugenics gained many supporters in the progressive-era United States, Canada, and much of Europe. But the concept was riddled with class and racial biases that inflicted harm on thousands of supposedly "inferior" humans. When the excesses of Adolf Hitler's World War II eugenics programs became known, this effort at human engineering fell into disrepute.

Galton was a respected scientist and statistician, but his eugenics notions were based less on evolution than on Social Darwinism, a philosophy that conveniently justified growing inequities in industrializing societies.


Nations could no longer wait for evolution to weed out the weak and stupid; rather, experts would facilitate the process of improving the race, by which most eugenicists meant white northern Europeans.

Positive eugenics tried to encourage "superior" men and women to produce superior offspring. (The Galtons were childless.) Negative eugenics went much further. It proposed to discourage "defective" humans from reproducing at all.

Soon, eugenics agencies and research facilities were springing up. A eugenics laboratory, later named in Galton's honor, was founded at London's University College in 1904. In the United States Charles Davenport created a Eugenics Record Office on Long Island.

U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, fearing "race suicide," heartily approved of this burgeoning movement to weed out the "unfit." The state of Indiana in 1907 was the first to pass a eugenics sterilization law.

Buck v. Bell, a eugenics sterilization case from Virginia, came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. Speaking for eight of the nine justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled in favor of the state.

US Eugenics

Carrie Buck, he noted, "is a feeble-minded white woman . . . the daughter of a feeble-minded mother ... and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child," adding, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." By 1933 28 states had sterilized more than 16,000 unconsenting women, men, and children.

In Canada interest in eugenics peaked among English speakers during the Great Depression, when the poor and sick seemed an impossible burden. The Soviet Union and many European nations also promoted fitter families while trying to minimize the "unfit."

Everywhere the poor and uneducated, racial and ethnic minorities, and criminals were overwhelmingly beneficiaries of "genetic cleansing." But none took eugenics as far as Nazi Germany, where Hitler copied many aspects of U.S. eugenics practices and passed laws in the 1930s that foreshadowed the elimination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others considered unfit.

In the wake of these atrocities, most eugenics organizations disbanded or rethought their goals. In 1942 the Supreme Court struck down involuntary sterilization of criminals; in 2001 Virginia apologized for Buck and other eugenics interventions.

As genetic science has expanded dramatically, the ethics of genetic improvement remains a very touchy topic. Birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger of the United States and Marie Stopes in Britain were both ardent eugenicists, leading today's abortion foes to distrust the underlying aims of family planning. New technologies raise the specter of prenatal engineering for "perfect" babies—a concept Galton did not precisely foresee but would probably have applauded.

Existentialism

Existentialism

Existentialism is a chiefly philosophical and literary movement that became popular after 1930 and that provides a distinctive interpretation of human existence. The question of the meaning of human existence is of supreme importance to existentialism, which advocates that people should create value for themselves through action and living each moment to its fullest.

Existentialism serves as a protest against academic philosophy and possesses an antiestablishment sensibility. It contrasts both the rationalist tradition, which defines humanity in terms of rational capacity, and positivism, which describes humanity in terms of observable behavior.

Existential philosophy teaches that human beings exist in an indifferent, objective, ambiguous, and absurd context in which individual meaning is created through action and interpretation.


Although there is a diversity of thought in the movement, its thinkers agree that all individuals possess the freedom and responsibility to make the most of life. Existentialists maintain the principle that "existence precedes essence," an observation made by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), atheist humanist and the only selfproclaimed "existentialist." This principle advocates that there is no predefined essence of the human being and that essence is what a human makes for itself.

Each of the existentialist thinkers, however, worked out their own interpretations of existence. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), a religious Danish philosopher known as the "father of existentialism," possessed a belief in the Christian God. He attacked abstract Hegelian metaphysics and the worldly complacency of the Danish Church.

Kierkegaard believed that individual existence indicates being withdrawn from the world, which causes individual self-awareness. Individuals despair when confronted with the truth that their finite existence emerged detached from God.

This despair, thus, gives rise to faith, despite the absurdity of that faith. Other philosophical precursors who are believed to have influenced modern existentialist philosophy include St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).

German philosopher Martin Heideger (1889–1976) believed that the starting place for philosophy should be studying the nature of the existence of the human being. In his book Being and Time (1962), he intended to provoke people to ask questions about the nature of human existence. He intended that such questioning would have the result of causing people to live a desirable life and "possess an authentic way of being."

Several French authors possessed existentialist beliefs. Parisian-born Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) advocated that the purpose of philosophy was to elevate human thinking to the point of being able to accept divine revelation.

He coined the term existentialism in order to characterize the thought of Sartre and his lifelong friend and associate Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). De Beauvoir, a Parisian existentialist author and feminist, penned She Came to Stay (1943) and The Blood of Others (1945).

These works suggested that the viewpoint of someone else is necessary for an individual to have a self or be a subject. Jean-Paul Sartre, also a Paris native, popularized existentialism in his widely known 1946 lecture "Existentialism and Humanism." The lecture set out the main tenets of the movement.

Taking Sartre's lead, existentialists rejected the pursuit of happiness, as it was believed to be nothing but a fantasy of the middle class. Sartre's existential thought can best be observed in his novels Nausea (1938), credited as the manifesto of existentialism, and No Exit (1943).

Existential thought became further disseminated through Sartre's colleagues, who included Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) and Albert Camus (1913– 60). Merleau-Ponty sought to provide a new understanding of sensory phenomena and a redefinition of the relationship between subject and object and between the self and the world.

Perhaps the most influential and well-known 20th-century existential writers, Sartre and Camus, also took part in the French Resistance, having been galvanized by the atrocities of World War II. Although the only self-professed existentialist was Sartre, the other thinkers associated with the movement are associated with it because of their similar beliefs.

Camus wrote novels concerned with the existential problem of finding meaning in an otherwise meaningless world and taking responsibility for creating human meaning. He advocated that the chief virtue of humanity was the ability to rebel against the corrupt and philosophically undesirable status quo.

From the 1940s on, the movement influenced a diversity of other disciplines, including theology, and thinkers such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and Karl Barth (1886–1968), whose 1933 biblical commentary on the Epistle to the Romans inspired the "Kierkegaard revival" in theology.

The principles of existentialism entered psychology through the 1965 work of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), General Psychopathology, and influenced other psychologists such as Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), Otto Rank (1884–1939), R. D. Laing (1927–89), and Viktor Frankl (1905–97).

Other writers who expressed existentialist themes included the marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Samuel Beckett (1906–89), Ralph Ellison (1914–94), Marguerite Duras (1914–96), and Jack Kerouac (1922–69). The work of artists Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), Jackson Pollock (1912–56), Arshile Gorky (1904–48), and Willem de Kooning (1904–97) and filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) also became understood in existential terms.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Freud's theories had and still have great effects on psychiatry, psychology, and related fields. For many, Freud is the most influential intellectual of his age because his theories provided a completely new interpretation of culture, society, and history.

Freud was born into a Jewish family in Freiberg (today Príbor), Moravia, in the Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). His large family had only limited finances but made every effort to foster his intellect, which was apparent from an early age.

In 1873 Freud entered the University of Vienna as a medical student, and in 1881 he received a doctorate. Beginning in 1882, he worked as a clinical assistant at the Central Hospital of Vienna. In 1885 Freud was appointed lecturer of neuropathology.


At this time he also developed an interest in the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Despite some limited successes, the general outcome of this research was disastrous and tarnished Freud's medical reputation for some time.

In late 1885 Freud left Vienna and traveled to Paris to continue his studies under the guidance of the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot's work with patients classified as hysterics confronted Freud with the possibility that some, if not all, mental disorders might be caused by psychological factors rather than by organic diseases.

This insight proved to be a turning point in Freud's career. Having been confronted with the use of hypnosis in therapy, Freud returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary method implanted.

Several months after his return, Freud married the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, Martha Bernays. She was to bear him six children, one of whom, Anna Freud, was later to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right. Freud then turned to a clinical practice in neuropsychology.

Shortly after his marriage Freud entered into a fruitful partnership with his fellow physician Josef Breuer. Their main cowritten work was Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895. This book contains a presentation of Freud's psychoanalytical method of free association.

This pioneering method of psychoanalysis—a term Freud created in 1896—allowed him to arrive at numerous insights. Freud and Breuer discovered that for many of their patients the very act of verbalization of their problems seemed to provide some relief. Such a "talking cure" resulted in an abreaction.

Freud subsequently developed a theory of the human mind and clinical techniques for helping neurotics. The goal of Freudian therapy is to bring to consciousness repressed feelings.

Typically, this is achieved by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to repeat his or her dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a lack of involvement by the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project emotions onto the analyst.

Through this transference the patient can resolve repressed conflicts. Freud also observed the power of what he called the patient's defenses against any expression of unconscious thoughts and feelings. He looked for a method to overcome such blockages. Freud was the first one to believe that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual.

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to modern interpretations of human nature is his conception of the dynamic unconscious. He suggested that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts.

On the contrary, Freud proposed that there were thoughts occurring below the surface. His basic assumption was that all dreams, even nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety, are the fulfillment of imaginary wishes.

One could also regard dreams to be the disguised expression of wish fulfillments. Many commentators consider The Interpretation of Dreams Freud's masterwork because it provides a hermeneutic for the unmasking of the dream's disguise.

Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is repression. Because of the incompatibility of the unconscious with conscious thoughts, these feelings are normally hidden, forgotten, or unavailable to conscious reflection.

Such thoughts and feelings cannot, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but they can be banished from consciousness. Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a nonconscious act. He supposed that what people repressed was determined by their unconscious.

Freud sought to explain how the unconscious operates by proposing that it has a particular structure divided into three parts: id, ego, and superego. The unconscious id represents primary process thinking, our primitive need-gratification thoughts. The superego represents our socially induced conscience and counteracts the id with moral and ethical thoughts.

The largely conscious ego stands in between both to balance our primitive needs and our moral beliefs. A healthy ego provides the ability to adapt to reality and interact with the outside world in a way that accommodates both id and superego. Freud was especially concerned with the dynamic relationship between these three parts of the mind.

According to Freud, the defense mechanisms are the method by which the ego can solve the conflicts between the superego and the id. The overuse of defense mechanisms can lead to either anxiety or guilt, which may result in psychological disorders.

In 1905 Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The book established its author as a pioneer in the serious study of sexology. Sexuality, Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a great deal of human activities and behavior.

Freud believed that humans were motivated by two drives, libidinal energy/Eros and the death drive/Thanatos. Freud's description of Eros/libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm or of nonexistence.

According to Freud, children pass through a stage where they fixate on the parent of the opposite sex and think of the same-sexed parent as a rival. Every male child has the desire to sleep with his mother and remove his father, who is the obstacle to the realization of that wish. Turning, as he often did, to evidence from literary and mythical texts, Freud named his theory the Oedipus complex after the Greek tragedy by Sophocles.

Freud expressed highly influential and controversial views on the psychology of women. He was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women. Some feminists, however, have argued that Freud's views of women's sexual development set the progress of women back decades.

Believing as Freud did that women are a kind of mutilated male who must learn to accept her deformity (the lack of a penis), he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny. Terms such as penis envy and castrating discouraged women from entering any field dominated by men.

Psychoanalysis today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life. His psychological theories are still hotly disputed. Although Freud has been long regarded as a genius, psychiatry and psychology have been recast as scientific disciplines.

Freud examined the rationality to be found even in material regarded as thoroughly irrational and meaningless, such as dreams, verbal slips, neurotic symptoms, and the verbal productions of psychotics. Conversely, he discovered irrationality even in material that is manifestly rational.

Freud introduced a novel discursive technique in the talking cure. Psychoanalysis enables people to mitigate distress through the indirect revelation of unconscious content. The other schools of psychology have produced alternative methods of psychotherapy.

In 1909 Freud, together with Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, visited the United States and lectured there. Generally, Freud had little tolerance for colleagues who diverged from his psychoanalytic doctrines.

He attempted to expel those who disagreed with the movement or even refused to accept certain aspects of his theory that he considered central. The most widely noted schisms occurred with Adler in 1911 and Jung in 1913. These clashes were followed by later breaks with Ferenczi and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s.

Freud lived and worked in Vienna for nearly 78 years, deeply inspired by the town's intellectual atmosphere. Following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, Freud fled Austria with his family.

On June 4, 1938, they were allowed across the border into France, and then they traveled to London. Freud died there three weeks after the first shots of World War II had been fired.

Worldwide Great Depression

Worldwide Great Depression

The most dramatic economic shock the world has ever known began on October 24, 1929, "Black Thursday." After years of large-scale speculations, with millions of investors borrowing money to chase the dream of easy riches and hundreds of banks willing to accept stocks as collateral, stock prices eventually far exceeded the companies' actual productivity, and the bubble burst.

The collapse of the New York stock exchange continued through October 29 ("Black Tuesday"), and during the following days and weeks countless investors found themselves broke, while hundreds of banks were forced to default on their loans.

By the early 1940s Dow Jones stock prices were still approximately 75 percent below the 1929 peak, a level that was only reached again in 1955. The Federal Reserve refused to provide emergency lending to help key banks to at least partially recover from their losses, so that the number of banks in operation almost halved over the next four years, driving thousands of business owners to the wall as their banks called in loans to stay afloat.


Furthermore, because the banking system could no longer supply the necessary liquidity, new business enterprises could not be undertaken, and millions of workers lost their jobs with little hope of regaining them in the near future.

In 1933 and 1934 one-half of the total U.S. workforce was jobless or underemployed. To make things worse, home mortgages and loans had produced a huge amount of consumer debt, and although incomes decreased, debts did not. Predictably, consumer spending declined dramatically: Between 1929 and 1933 expenses for food and housing went down by more than 40 percent, with crop prices following the same downward path.

The crisis in the financial markets had set off a domino reaction, but U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a steadfast advocate of laissez-faire principles and believed that the "invisible hand" of the market and the moral fiber of the American people would ensure that everything would eventually work out.

In keeping with the contemporary tendency to manage economic problems by trade measures, Hoover adopted austerity policies, and on June 17, 1930, he signed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which doubled import duties on selected goods, causing other Western countries, already burdened by war debts and reparations dating back to the Versailles Treaty of 1919, to react by raising their own import tariffs. This provoked a major disruption of world trade.

World Economic Disaster

Internationally, a combination of high external debt, falling export prices, government fiscal difficulties, and internal banking crises spelled disaster for the world economy. Latin American countries, the most dependent on selling raw materials to U.S. industries, were the first to default on their debts.

Bolivia defaulted in January 1931, Peru in March of the same year, Chile in July, and Brazil and Colombia in October. Europe was hit in 1931, when several banking crises translated into foreign exchange and fiscal crises. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece were forced to default in 1932, followed by Austria and Germany in 1933.

Austria's largest bank, Vienna's Kreditanstalt, failed in May 1931, an event that sent shockwaves across Europe. Depositors rushed to withdraw their money from banks that were perceived to be in weak financial conditions and, in so doing, they compromised the stability of the entire banking systems of several countries. By mid-June, many German banks had collapsed. The three largest Italian banks were rescued by the Fascist regime.

One of the main consequences of this chain reaction was that trust in sovereign loans was shattered. The social and political repercussions were catastrophic. Industrial unemployment in the United States averaged 37.6 percent in 1933, while Germany reached its highest rate at 43.8 percent, the United Kingdom at 22.1, Sweden at 23.7, Denmark at 28.8, and Belgium at 20.4 percent. In western Canada more than one-fifth of the labor force remained unemployed throughout the 1930s. Meanwhile, in the United States, the penal system became increasingly punitive.

More executions were carried out than in any other decade in U.S. history, and there was also a sharp rise in imprisonment. Crime rates did not significantly rise, but the mass media popularized the idea that the social order was on the verge of collapse, generating a "crime wave" frenzy among the public.

Slump Stabilized

By the early 1930s, the economic slump had destabilized the international political order, the erosion of liberal values was at an advanced stage, and welfarist costbenefit analysis had gained appeal and credibility.

Prompted by the need to cut down on public spending and by the moral panic generated by the Great Depression, several governments of the most advanced democratic countries lost confidence in the effectiveness of social reforms and undertook programs for the involuntary sterilization of thousands of citizens.

It was argued that under exceptional circumstances, basic rights could be withheld and that in order to reduce the burden on the public purse, social services should only be granted to those whose social usefulness and biological capability were past doubt. In the Weimar Republic, the country hardest hit by the depression, this ideological shift produced a radicalization of medical views on racial hygiene and "euthanasia."

Trade protectionism, nationalism, and the growing appeal of fascism were among the most tragic results of the depression. Earlier enthusiasm for internationalism, cosmopolitan law, and international institutions completely disappeared, replaced by the feeling that large-scale conflicts between powers were once again inevitable.

In the Far East during the 1920s, hundreds of villages in the Chinese hinterland had seen their consumption patterns change dramatically as a consequence of the marketing campaigns of transnational corporations, which employed hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants. However, the progressive internationalization and connectedness of the Chinese economy meant that it became increasingly vulnerable to trade fluctuations.

When the depression took place, the entire structure of Chinese agricultural production was hit with unprecedented force: The process of pauperization of the countryside population seemed unstoppable. Two major consequences ensued, the strengthening of the Communist Party and a major diaspora of Chinese emigrants seeking a better future abroad.

In Japan, a country that was heavily dependent on foreign trade, unemployment soared, and labor disputes became more and more frequent and violent, as did anti-Japanese insurgent movements in Korea and Taiwan. Rural debt forced poor tenant farmers to sell their daughters as prostitutes, and thousands of small businesses were gradually absorbed by the zaibatsu, huge financial combines that pushed for more authoritarian and imperialistic policies.

In the United States, Hoover's seeming idleness was interpreted by millions of U.S. voters as callousness, and the presidential candidate for the Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who evoked a more interventionist and caring state, won a landslide victory in 1932. His presidency will be forever identified with the New Deal, a series of Keynesian relief, recovery, and reform measures.

This program revitalized the economy by reinvigorating mass consumption through deficit spending and restored psychological confidence and people's trust in U.S. institutions and in the future by effectively reshaping their expectations. Ultimately, the U.S. economy was reinvigorated by these measures but also by the industrial demands brought about by the coming of World War II.

Deficit spending for government-funded public works programs was successfully used to aid economic recovery in Social Democratic Sweden but also in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan. These countries were among the first to overcome the crisis.

On the other hand, in Britain and France, two countries whose currencies were pegged to the gold standard, mostly for reasons of national pride, a genuine recovery only began when large-scale rearmament was under-taken as a reaction to the National Socialist threat. It is noteworthy that those countries that remained on the gold standard fared far worse than those that did not.

In the final analysis, the depression lasted for about a decade and was aggravated by a steadfast and selfdefeating loyalty to the gold standard, as well as by increased wealth inequality and financial speculation. It was brought to an end not by the concerted effort of fair-minded and judicious leaders committed to the cause of world prosperity and peace, but by a vast military buildup leading straight into World War II.

Industrial Workers of the World

IWW logo

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a U.S. workers' movement that had a significant impact on organized labor during the first two decades of the 20th century. IWW members were commonly known as Wobblies (one story holds that this moniker came from the wobble saw used by lumberjacks).

Founded in 1905, the organization was always small, with a peak membership numbering in the tens of thousands during the 1910s, but the Wobblies successfully agitated among many more workers. Influenced by European syndicalist ideas about remaking society, they sought to create "one big union" that would bring together all laborers. They offered the vision of a nation in which wages and private profits were abolished, and business-dominated government gave way to "industrial democracy."

Ferocious opponents of the American Federation of Labor, which organized only craft workers, the IWW focused on the semiskilled and unskilled: mass-production factory hands, loggers, longshoremen, migrant farm workers, and domestic servants. Their interest in organizing African Americans and newly arrived immigrants was particularly unusual in an era of racial and ethnic polarization.

Unlike other organized labor groups, the IWW rejected the idea of collective bargaining to improve wages and working conditions. They refused to sign contracts, arguing that this would impede workers' ability to take action.


They also were uninterested in traditional political activism, because many of the groups to whom they appealed were unable to vote. Instead, they wanted to foment change by creating a revolutionary proletarian culture.

Wobblies typically went out in "flying squadrons" of mobile agitators, riding the rails, sleeping in hobo "jungles" on the outskirts of towns, and preaching the IWW message to all those among whom they lived and worked. The Wobblies were known for their constant singing while they traveled or were in jail.

Although they often used inflammatory rhetoric, this was paired with acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. One attention-grabbing tactic was their "free speech" fight. The point was to educate onlookers about their constitutional rights and the unjustness of authorities.

A Wobbly would stand on a soapbox on a street corner, delivering a harangue. If he or she was arrested, another Wobbly would immediately take up the speech and be arrested in turn, until the local jail was flooded and the public expense became prohibitive.

The IWW also taught various forms of nonviolent resistance on the job. Workers would surreptitiously slow down their pace of production, or they might deliberately feed a machine too quickly so that the wheels became clogged.

IWW Poster

The IWW pioneered the use of the sit-down strike; the first recorded in U.S. history occurred in 1906 in Schenectady, New York, when 3,000 workers trained by Wobblies simply sat down in their factory and refused to leave.

While most labor organizations have a formal structure with elected officials, a central headquarters, and union locals, the IWW was the opposite: Members often boasted that they were all leaders and that their "locals" could be found under any traveling member's hat.

This decentralization made it possible for the Wobblies to agitate among a wide variety of laborers across the country. In 1912 they enjoyed a major success when they led a strike at textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

They managed to sustain cross-ethnic solidarity among 23,000 workers during the difficult winter months, not only winning concessions on pay and work hours but also highlighting issues such as dangerous workplace conditions and child labor. In 1913 they led a similar strike in Paterson, New Jersey, which became a cause célèbre among New York City's leftist intellectuals, culminating with a dramatic worker pageant held at Madison Square Garden.

The Wobblies ultimately failed to build a long-term movement. Workers gravitated to the IWW when they wanted to fight for "bread and butter" issues, but upon attaining these immediate material goals they rarely stayed committed to the Wobbly call for revolution.

The IWW was viewed as a dangerous organization by business interests, and Wobbly agitators were sometimes subject to brutal repression. For example, in 1916 in Everett, Washington, a deputized crowd at a dock fired on a steamship full of singing Wobblies, killing or wounding several dozen.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the IWW had succeeded in organizing copper mines in the West to the extent that national production was threatened. In the heated wartime atmosphere, the IWW was denounced on the Senate floor as standing for "Imperial Wilhelm's Warriors." The Woodrow Wilson administration decided to prosecute Wobblies for espionage and "criminal syndicalism."

In September 1917 the Justice Department conducted raids on every significant IWW hall, and by the end of the year more than a hundred prominent organizers were locked up. In a mass trial in 1918, the government was unable to show that the Wobblies had committed any crimes, instead focusing on their "seditious and disloyal" teachings.

Most were convicted, and over the next several years the organization expended its energies and meager financial resources fighting the convictions. Internal schisms and further legal repression left the IWW impotent by the mid-1920s.