Wielka Wojna profesorów : nauki o człowieku (1912-1923)

Górny, Maciej (1976– )

doi:978-83-63352-33-2

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Wielka Wojna profesorów : nauki o człowieku (1912-1923)

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Tytuł: Wielka Wojna profesorów : nauki o człowieku (1912-1923)

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The national characterology has always been the most popular of intellectual endeavors. The search for hidden traces of one’s own and other human groups heritage seems to respond to the vital needs of any social group, as shown by sociological and psychological research from the 1960s onwards. Nevertheless, attempts to place the national characterology in the frame of scientific methodology were made as early as the 18th century. In the mid-19th century, a group of German scientists attempted to regulate the methodology of Völkerpsychologie – as the science had been baptized – announcing it to be the new, more ‘humanistic’ division of psychology. It absorbed findings of the human sciences and searched for general answers to the question of the psychological profile of entire ethnic groups. Further, notwithstanding the optimistic visions of Moritz Lazarus and Hajim Steinthal, the scientific discourse devoted to the national character went through an evolution analogous to other human sciences, paying tribute to the developing nation-state and adapting to the new scientific disciplines such as physical anthropology and psychology. This was especially visible in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the 1870s in Germany and afterwards. But the mobilization of ‘national science’ in service of state and nation was a general phenomenon, with powerful representations in East-Central Europe [...]. Maciej Górny’s book offers a new perspective on the intellectual history of the First World War. It addresses the old and already unfashionable topic of intellectual mobilization lending it a dimension that has been almost totally absent before – the role of intellectuals in East-Central Europe and the Balkans. The wide geographical and linguistic range of this study makes it possible to reinterpret some of the popular historiographical theses, complicating the frontlines of the intellectual “Krieg der Geister”. Furthermore, it analyses little known aspects of the history of geography, anthropology, psychiatry and psychology in European perspective. Górny traces the surprising and unorthodox cultural transfers in each of those relatively recently institutionalized disciplines. Of note is the fact that, instead of following the developments of racial anthropology and other sciences up to their nationalist and eugenic engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, the author looks backward to the discipline of ‘national characterology’ oft he 19 th century. Thus, the history of the nationalist mobilization of human sciences that this book offers rejects the idea of a distinct break from a ‘humanistic’ to a ‘totalitarian’ science, which has typically been located short before the outbreak of the Great War. Instead of acceding to Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of Modernity, it points at the continuities and longue durée of intellectual positions throughout Europe.