Einstein on Politics (review)

When most Americans hear the name Albert Einstein, they think of an iconic scientist in his academic ivory tower, blithely uninvolved with the world around him. No image was further from the truth. In this valuable and thoughtfully structured book, the editors, David Rowe and Robert Schulmann, present the real Einstein: a scientist who was committed and combative, deeply and persistently involved with the moral imperatives of human dignity, freedom, and peace, a scientist who detested coercion, violence, war, and therefore the military, which he loathed because of its authoritarian nature. “The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt,” he wrote (p. 229). A consistent agnostic, devoid of nationalism with the exception of Zionism, and eschewing ideology but not idealism, he emphasized morality over politics or patriotism.

This book reflects Einstein’s principles and beliefs—the values and objectives that guided his life’s experiences. Einstein’s voice can be heard here through numerous letters to friends, adversaries, and the mass media, speeches, and articles in the international press, all arranged by the editors into ten chapters, each with a specific thematic focus. The editors preface each Einstein pronouncement or letter with commentary that elucidates the circumstances and the timing of the text. Often they also offer a postscript that explains or elaborates on some of the events and items mentioned by Einstein. The editors thus allow readers to enter Einstein’s world of beliefs and strong feelings. The book is so absorbing that after a while you almost imagine that you are living and conversing with the great physicist.

Most of Einstein’s writings and pronouncements in the book are translations from the original German he spoke and wrote; yet his use of language comes through as graceful, and his lucid prose reveals that he was a literate, articulate, eloquent man, passionately involved in public affairs and vigorous debates, at times quite forceful or contemptuous of attacks on him. His elegant argumentation, almost always flawlessly logical, is uncomplicated and linear and therefore readily convincing to the reader or listener.

Einstein’s profound antipathy toward the military (and such authority figures as his high school teachers!) and his somatic conviction that the optimal way to resolve international conflict is through the courts of law and negotiations, led him early on to renounce nationalism and patriotic sentiments and to advocate a world government and a world court. These institutions, he averred, would limit the sovereignty of states and promote human dignity and respect for individual rights (e.g, letter to Heinrich Zangger, p. 77). Deeply affected by the carnage of World War I and the schisms that nationalist antagonisms had created in the world scientific community during that period, he insisted on internationalism and cooperation without regard for national borders. It is somewhat ironic that it took a second, vastly more destructive war to persuade at least some countries to adopt Einstein’s approach: The United Nations, the World Court, and, much more successfully, the European Union have vindicated Einstein’s belief in internationalism and the abridgement of national sovereignty, all beliefs that during his lifetime were considered naïve.

In his political beliefs Einstein had to reverse himself once, and on two other occasions his principles and actions appeared logically inconsistent. In the first instance he had to reconsider his pacifism—not his belief in the desirability of it but temporarily in its practicality. Einstein believed that if a mere 2 percent of the young in each country refused conscription into their armed forces, military establishments would collapse and wars would be avoided. He thought of it as an act of personal passive resistance that he was promoting for many years. But then Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany in 1933, and Einstein as a pragmatist advocated military opposition to Nazi Germany (e.g., letter to Alfred Nahon, p. 283). He insisted that his shift was circumstantial and temporary in order to safeguard “the political and individual freedom of man” (p. 314).

The...