"We Are Living in Two Centuries": The Rockefeller Foundation, Modernity, and the Future of Knowledge in Europe, 1944–51

In 1946, Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick was in the twilight of his career as an international jurist, Progressive reformer, and peacemaker. As a board member and later as president of the world's largest and most influential private patron of scientific research, he had written extensively on what he believed to be the definitive dichotomy of human existence: the simultaneous striving for self-betterment through humanistic introspection and scientific exploration on one hand and, on the other, the seemingly endless seduction of self-destructive violence and barbarism. Two world wars and the horrific specter of a third and final atomic world war, he believed, had led humanity past a fatal threshold. Modern social institutions—law, constitutional government, science, and the Enlightenment itself—had previously matched and contained humanity's darker impulses; now, the technologies of the atomic age surpassed the capacity for control. The gap between these two centuries, Fosdick proposed, defined the fragile condition of postwar humanity. No country, Fosdick and his staff believed, embodied this dual tendency more than Germany. The German university at the turn of the twentieth century had been the world's model for achievement in medicine and the sciences. Yet under National Socialism, German scientists' work supported aggressive war and the racial state, and their enabling of German militarism had brought ruin to Germany. Rather than reconstructing German science after the war, the Rockefeller Foundation's trustees and staff directed their efforts at the restoration of balance to Europe in general, and to Germany in particular, through the support of new academic programs in the humanities and social sciences. This paper will examine the intellectual influences of Fosdick's underlying assumptions about the state of humanity after WWII, their influence on the debates within the Foundation that defined its policy and program in postwar Europe, and the program of European reconstruction itself.