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Way, Peace,and the Intellectuals The West German Peace Movement JePq Herf T h e political movement attempting to prevent implementation of NATO's 1979 two-track decision called itself the "peace movement," a label that it is now considered bad form to avoid. The label is powerful, for it suggests three things: first, it suggests there is a greater danger of war now than before, to which the movement is a sensible response; second, the particular aims of this movement correspond to a general interest in peace; and third, adherents of such a movement are more interested in peace than their fellow citizens and the diplomats and soldiers whose professional activities focus on the issue. Yet, with stunning consistency, the members of recent peace movements in Western Europe are drawn almost exclusivelyfrom one group: young, universityeducated , left-leaning intellectuals and people who have passed through West German universities in the 1960sand after. Ordinarily, when particular social groups advocate views that are so distinctive, a skeptical social science turns its gaze toward the underlying views such groups hold that lead them to interpret reality in the ways they do. Rather than looking exclusively to such views in this case, here I will examine both the ideas and institutions that contributed to the mobilization of intellectuals in West Germany from 1980 to 1983. The New Left's "Long March Through the Institutiuizs" The first question to be addressed is a general one: why has the political judgment of intellectuals over time traditionally been so poor? This is a question that has deeply concerned some of the major figures of modern social and political theory, among them Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter, and more recently, Edward Shils and Daniel Bell. Their answer in short was that intellectuals are heirs to an aristocratic-religioustradition that aspires to offer moral and political leadership to society, yet because of their remoteness from practical affairs as well as their endemic and politically Jeffrey Herf is a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies and the Center for lnternational Affairs at Harvard University. He will begin teaching in the Political Science Department of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in September 1986. International Security, Spring 1986 (Vol. 10, No. 4) 6 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 172 War, Peace, and the Intellectuals I 173 ambivalent hostility to capitalism, they are often attracted to illiberal political views. The compromises of liberal politics have often appeared to many intellectuals as less attractive than the promise of community and decisiveness offered by dictatorships of the right or left. Hence they have often adopted unwise political views for reasons having to do with some aspects of intellectual activity-for example, its moralism and distance from practical affairs. An additional cause of the tension between intellectuals and liberal democracies has been an anti-capitalism endemic to the culture of Western intellectuals for the last century and a half. In pre-1945 Europe, this endemic anti-capitalismdrew many of the continent’s most distinguished intellectuals to the right. Since 1945, Nazism and fascism have been utterly discredited among intellectuals, so that when the anti-capitalismof the intelligentsia did revive in the 1960s, it did so exclusively on the left. Because of the sheer growth in the number of intellectuals in the last several decades, and because of the importance of the interpretation of reality as a political factorgenerally, the intellectuals have remained a decisive political factor, especially in democratic societies. The West German new left of the 1960s shared many features with the new left in other advanced capitalist democracies. An early anarchist, antiauthoritarian radicalism turned into a number of Marxist-Leninist sects and terrorist bands. The West German left is also distinctive in the degree to which it has exerted an enduring impact on the intellectuallife of the country. Compared to the United States, this is a difference in degree rather than in kind. There are several reasons for the persistence of West German radicalism . First, Marxism and romanticism are strong indigenous national traditions . Second, National Socialism and the effort to “come to terms with the past” created unusually...

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