Defending Alignment

Stephan Schwarz

SAGE Open, 2016, vol. 6, issue 2, 2158244016643565

Abstract: After the rise to power of the German National Socialist Party (January 30, 1933), German academia soon realized that a requirement for “muddling through†was to avoid the stigma of being regarded as “politically unreliable,†thus to appear aligned and loyal to the state policies. The focus is here on the physics community. A rhetoric of alignment developed with the objective to justify collaboration as a rational and morally justified strategy. In the early post-war years, the rhetoric was reoriented to deny any involvement (other than as resistance) systematically using a conceptual framework foreshadowing the principles of Cognitive Dissonance Reduction (CDR) and the related framework of Rhetorical (Informal) Fallacies. This affinity is here studied with reference to statements from the period.

Keywords: physics in Nazi Germany; alignment; Persilschein; bygonism; Werner Heisenberg; Otto Hahn; Max Planck; Max von Laue; cognitive dissonance reduction; rhetorical fallacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244016643565 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:6:y:2016:i:2:p:2158244016643565

DOI: 10.1177/2158244016643565

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().