Scientists and modern society

In his classic book on the German academic community in the early twentieth century, Fritz Ringer analysed how German professors tried to cope with the challenges of modern society.Footnote ¹⁰ At the end of the nineteenth century, specialization in science and the rise of a new industrial elite had eroded the social status of university professors as guardians of learning and culture. To reclaim their central role in society, many academics tried to revive traditional values of Bildung and Gemeinschaft. Their agenda was closely related to a revival of neo-Romantic, holistic ideas in the same period. The Mandarins, as Ringer called them, emphasized the importance of universal truth and morality over specialization and fragmented (commercial) interests. Ringer also identified a minority of pragmatist academics who adopted a different approach. They tried to adapt to modern society and to establish themselves as politically neutral expert advisers of governments and policy makers. For them, science was a tool, albeit a very powerful one. So powerful, in fact, that they believed that experts should be assigned an important advisory role in every major political decision.

Max Weber was one of Ringer's most prominent pragmatists.Footnote ¹¹ In his famous lecture ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (Science as a vocation, 1919), Weber described scientists as neutral and objective advisers and referees of politics – a modest approach which at the same time opened up the possibility for them to become politically active without compromising their scientific neutrality.Footnote ¹² Both Mandarins and pragmatists were motivated by conservatism, according to Ringer. They tried to regain the status of ‘guardians of culture and civilization’ they had enjoyed in the nineteenth century.

In his book on styles of thought in the German genetics community, Jonathan Harwood has elaborated on Ringer's thesis.Footnote ¹³ He claimed that the proportion of pragmatists was much greater than Ringer suggested, and that the Mandarins' political views were not uniformly conservative. The modernist intellectuals were politically more active than the proponents of Bildung, but there was no direct correlation between, on the one hand, their views on the social role of science and, on the other, their political ideology. Scientists who favoured Bildung were not significantly more politically right-wing than others, and pragmatists were not particularly leftist. Harwood did, however, see a correlation with views of science: proponents of Bildung were often ‘comprehensive’ thinkers, who tried combine science, religion and philosophy into one all-encompassing system. The metaphysically pragmatic intellectuals were also pragmatic in politics. They tried to separate science from ethics.

Both Harwood and Ringer analysed German intellectuals in terms of an opposition between two styles of thought: holistic or synthetic versus pragmatic or modernist. In this paper, however, I aim to show that this dichotomy does not fit most Dutch intellectuals. Many Dutch scientists tried to combine a holistic, organic style of thought with Weberian views of technocracy and expert leadership. Their science was to be neutral, but not value-free.Footnote ¹⁴ This shows that holistic and pragmatic styles of thought are not necessarily opposites, as Ringer and Harwood claim, and neither are synthetic and pragmatic views of science. Neo-Romantic idealism and technocracy were sometimes combined; what looks like conservative intellectualism might be a highly modern approach to political engagement.

In Reenchanted Science, Anne Harrington analysed a group of German ‘life and mind scientists’ (biologists and psychologists) who promoted an active political role for an ethically meaningful science.Footnote ¹⁵ Inspired by the work of Goethe and of foreign contemporaries such as Bergson, Whitehead and the South African statesman Smuts, their work was characterized by holistic ideas that were comparable to those of the Dutch syntheticists.

Harrington then described how many of the German holists were gradually drawn into an anti-Semitic and völkisch discourse in the 1930s. According to Jeffrey Herf, the combination of a holistic, neo-Romantic style of thought with enthusiasm for modern science and technology was characteristic of radical right-wing intellectuals in Weimar and Nazi Germany.Footnote ¹⁶ However, Harrington emphasized that fascism was not inherent in the holistic philosophy, but rather a reaction to specific circumstances in Germany at that time. The radically different political course of the Dutch intellectuals reinforces her point. As we shall see, scientists such as physicist Philip Kohnstamm and biologist Hermann Jacques Jordan were led to the opposite end of the political spectrum by their holistic views. Their ‘synthesis’ was to be an all-encompassing system, but not a totalitarian one.

Harrington focused on German biologists and psychologists, as holistic tendencies were most prominent in these disciplines. Harwood also focused on life scientists. Ringer, on the other hand, studied scholars from the social sciences and the humanities. In the Netherlands, as in Germany, the range of intellectuals involved in the quest for synthesis was a very broad one, and life scientists such as Jordan and psychologist F.J.J. Buytendijk were similarly prominent among them.

Wijsgeerige beweging (‘philosophical movement’)

To understand the backgrounds of the synthetic technocrat movement, we have to go back to the late nineteenth century, when the Netherlands, like many other western European countries, witnessed heated debates about the values of science.Footnote ¹⁷ In the 1880s, a group of poets and artists known as the Tachtigers (‘the Movement of the Eighties’) founded the journal De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide). Its title was an explicit jibe at De Gids, the leading journal of the nineteenth-century liberal cultural establishment. The Tachtigers preached a radical, individualist approach to art, emphasizing personal experience and aestheticism. In the 1890s, the movement fell apart, with several prominent members converting to the more socially oriented ideology of gemeenschapskunst (Gemeinschaft or community art).

However short-lived, the Tachtigers set the stage for the surge of philosophical publications that became known as the wijsgeerige beweging (‘philosophical movement’) around the turn of the century.Footnote ¹⁸ Most of the publications shared a loathing of what contemporaries regarded as typical nineteenth-century thought: materialist, determinist, positivist, arrogant, ‘dead’ science, with no room for human values and personality. German scientists such as Büchner, Moleschott, Vogt and Haeckel were often attacked as representatives of this style of thought. Ernst Haeckel was a particular target of the ire of the philosophers, because he claimed to be able to solve great mysteries such as the origin of life and the origin of language. His book Die Welträhtsel (1899) became the standard example of naturalistic arrogance. The 1913 Dutch translation of Die Welträhtsel reinforced its reputation, as translator M.H. Flothuis had added a fiercely polemic anti-religious preface.Footnote ¹⁹ Whether Haeckel really was the fundamentalist materialist his critics claimed he was is immaterial; the point is that by attacking him, many Dutch intellectuals publicly renounced a certain style of scientific thought. They often preferred the views of Haeckel's friend and colleague, the Nobel Prize-winning Lebensphilosoph Rudolf Eucken.Footnote ²⁰

The anti-positivist mood of the wijsgeerige beweging was part of a European-wide phenomenon. Anti-positivist movements also flourished in Germany and Great Britain, while Ferdinand Brunetière's article on the ‘bankruptcy of science’ was the starting point of a heated debate in France.Footnote ²¹ In most cases, anti-positivism did not mean the rejection of science. Many anti-positivist movements were characterized by an eclectic mixture of occultism and modern scientific notions.Footnote ²² Although the Dutch wijsgeerige beweging was unorganized, it shared some characteristics with the German Monistenbund, including the rejection of dualism and the quest for an all-inclusive world view founded on modern science. The majority did not share the fierce anti-clericalism of the monists, however, and they resisted any attempts to present science as a new religion.Footnote ²³

To understand the cultural context in which the wijsgeerige beweging emerged, it is necessary to understand the main cultural and political developments in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century. Undoubtedly the most important of these was the emancipation of orthodox Calvinists, Catholics and socialists, which spelled the end of the dominance of liberals in politics and society. This marked the origin of the process that became known as ‘pillarization’, the gradual establishment of a division of society in all domains along ideological lines.Footnote ²⁴ The four main ‘pillars’ were orthodox Protestants, Catholics, socialists and a less homogeneous group usually identified as liberals. There were also several smaller groups such as the communists and liberal Protestants. Pillarization created an almost completely segregated social system, with each group having its own political parties, unions, schools, newspapers, sports clubs and sometimes even shops.

Education policy was one of the central political issues of the period. Catholics and Protestants demanded state funding for religious educational institutions, which was fiercely rejected by socialists and liberals. It was not resolved until 1917, in a wide-ranging political compromise that also involved the introduction of universal suffrage. A key role in this debate was played by Abraham Kuyper, leader of the orthodox Calvinists.Footnote ²⁵ In 1880, Kuyper founded the first non-state university, the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Its explicit aim was to create a new science, founded on Calvinist principles, to counterbalance the science of the ‘liberal’ state universities.Footnote ²⁶ While small, the university was of great symbolic importance for the Protestant community. Kuyper also founded the first modern political party, as a part of his quest for emancipation of the Calvinist kleine luyden (‘little people’). In the late 1890s, he formulated the ‘antithesis’, which asserted a fundamental moral and cultural division between Christianity (of all denominations, including Catholicism) and ‘modernism’ of all varieties.Footnote ²⁷ As this division was fundamental and universal, it also included science.

Kuyper and his supporters considered education crucial to resolving the cultural and moral crisis caused by liberal politics and positivist philosophy. In one of many publications devoted to education policy, the orthodox theologian Isaac van Dijk wrote that contemporary scientists were ‘caught in analysis’. They only had an eye for causal relations, while the deeper meaning of natural phenomena, spiritual texts or art escaped them: ‘as a result of lifelong professional research, the sounding board for understanding these [deeper] things has simply vanished’.Footnote ²⁸ This one-sidedness threatened the very foundations of society:

And that, of course, was not the desired result.

Many Dutch scientists participated in the debates about positivism, materialism and the deeper understanding of phenomena. The scientific debates often focused on the meaning of causality.

One of the most prominent intellectuals of the period was Gerard Heymans, professor of psychology and philosophy in Groningen. He founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in the Netherlands in 1892. In 1905, he published his most ambitious work: Einführung in die Metaphysik auf Grundlage der Erfahrung. In this work, he outlined his ‘psychical monism’, a philosophical system inspired by the ideas of Gustav Fechner.Footnote ³⁰ Hardly an orthodox naturalist scientist, Heymans nevertheless found himself accused of being the personification of the arrogant positivist science of the nineteenth century. His view on causality, in particular, provoked strong reactions. Drawing upon the work of the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton, Heymans claimed that everything, including human thought, was subject to the logical (read: causal) laws of nature. In 1919, Heymans founded a society for psychical research, modelled after its much older English counterpart. The aim of this society was to investigate telepathy and other ‘psychical’ phenomena in a thoroughly scientific way.Footnote ³¹

Several scientists, including Johannes Diderik van der Waals Jr (son of the Nobel Prize laureate of the same name) and Jacob Clay, attacked Heymans in philosophical publications on causality and the laws of nature. His most vocal critic was Philip Kohnstamm.Footnote ³² Kohnstamm, a physicist, had studied with Van der Waals Sr in Amsterdam, and converted to Calvinism under his influence (he came from a liberal Jewish family). Together they wrote the classic Lehrbuch der Thermodynamik. Kohnstamm had also followed the lectures of the neo-Kantian philosopher C. Bellaar Spruyt. In 1907, he was admitted as a privaatdocent (unpaid lecturer) in philosophy at Amsterdam University. One year later, he succeeded the elder Van der Waals as professor of physics at the same university.

Traditionally, newly appointed lecturers and professors started their courses with a public lecture. Kohnstamm used his inaugural lectures of 1907 and 1908 to discuss his views on science and causality.Footnote ³³ He started by attacking the materialism and positivism of Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt, but he also criticized Ostwald's energetic monism. Kohnstamm rejected any kind of monism; according to him, no single principle could explain all reality. But he also distanced himself from descriptionism, which he interpreted as naturalism turned against itself. This was a well-known argument from the ‘bankruptcy of science’ debates in late nineteenth-century France and Britain.Footnote ³⁴ Knowledge could never be separated from moral values. In his 1908 lecture, Kohnstamm addressed the same issues, but he added a discussion of causality, with the explicit aim of refuting Heymans's idea that human thought could be determined by natural laws. At the same time, Kohnstamm wanted to save the universality of the laws of nature. His goal was a scientific world view that left room for free will and personality. He found the answer in the statistical mechanics of Bolzmann and Gibbs, which to him demonstrated the reality of chance and probability in nature. In later publications, he would go on to use his interpretation of relativity theory to attack causality.

Kohnstamm and Van der Waals Jr belonged to a group of scientists who joined the debates about the problems and the merits of positivist science after the turn of the century. They represented a new generation that succeeded the successful earlier generation of the ‘second golden age’ of Dutch science. This older generation included Lorentz, Van der Waals Sr, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Pieter Zeeman and Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn.Footnote ³⁵ While the senior scientists had carefully refrained from addressing big metaphysical questions in public, the younger generation enthusiastically joined philosophical debates. They spoke out in all kinds of intellectual media: public (academic) lectures, books and brochures, and articles in cultural journals such as De Gids and Onze Eeuw.

In their philosophical reflections, scientists such as Kohnstamm often supported notions of wholeness, community and all-encompassing synthesis.Footnote ³⁶ The aim of the syntheses they developed was to transcend Kuyper's antithesis, to combine science, religion and views of society and culture into a single philosophical framework in a way that satisfied liberals and socialists, freethinkers and Christians. The synthetic movement was, to a large extent, aimed against pillarization.

The philosophical foundation of the syntheses that Dutch intellectuals developed varied widely. Opposite the neo-Kantian psychical monism of Heymans stood the Hegelian philosopher G.J.P.J. Bolland. The latter gathered a large following, including scientists such as Clay.Footnote ³⁷ Former Tachtiger poet and physician Frederik van Eeden established a circle of intellectuals that included the mathematicians L.E.J. Brouwer and Gerrit Mannoury.Footnote ³⁸ Their philosophical outlook was founded on the school of Significa, inspired by the ideas of the British philosopher Lady Welby. The Significa was centred on language reform based on mathematics, with the aim of eradicating once and for all the misunderstandings that were the root of all evil. This was in a way comparable to the ultimate ideal of contemporary philosophical movements such as the Vienna circle, who wanted to purge all metaphysics from language. But contrary to the logical positivists, the significists managed to combine their mathematical ideas with a wide range of mystical and even spiritualist notions, in an eclectic mixture that was typical of the age. The quest for synthesis could sometimes result in hugely ambitious philosophical systems, as is illustrated by the title of a book published by Felix Ortt in 1917: Introduction to Pneumat-energetic Monism: A Treatise on God, the World, Life, Humanity and Society, from the Standpoint of Science.Footnote ³⁹ Few of these syntheses had more than a handful of followers. Thus, ironically, the sense of fragmentation became even stronger.

Synthesis was not only opposed to the ‘antithesis’; the notion carried many other implicit and explicit associations. It was often used as the opposite of ‘analysis’, especially by life scientists. Inspired by their German colleagues, Dutch biologists were strongly interested in holistic thought.Footnote ⁴⁰ The physiologist H.J. Jordan often referred to the work of Hans Driesch, and F.J.J. Buytendijk summarized his view on the importance of synthesis in a review of the work of Jakob von Uexküll:

Synthetic thought

In his classical study of physics in Weimar Germany, Paul Forman emphasized the impact of the cultural climate on physics. According to Forman, the catastrophe of the First World War created an intellectual climate that forced physicists to renounce causality, in order to regain credibility.Footnote ⁴² However, in a recent paper on the Forman thesis, Richard Staley has pointed out that the roots of the causality debate go back to ‘descriptionist’ science of the fin de siècle, as described by John Heilbron.Footnote ⁴³ As we have seen, several Dutch physicists also published critical philosophical arguments about causality before the war. Apparently, the causality debate did not originate in the war itself, but the war did have a marked effect on the nature of the debate.

The Netherlands remained neutral during the Great War. For that reason, the war's impact in Holland was not comparable to its impact in any of the surrounding countries. The horrific tales from the trenches and the thousands of Belgian refugees left a deep impression on Dutch intellectuals, but the result was not as deep a cultural crisis as the one that reigned in Germany. Many copies of Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes were sold in the Netherlands, but cultural pessimism was not felt as deeply.

The world war did have a notable influence on the tone of the intellectual public debate, however. It became less focused on abstract metaphysical issues, and more on contemporary politics and culture. The focus shifted from the philosophical aspects of science to its political and economic application, just as in Britain at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁴⁴ For example, many Dutch scientists were disappointed by the participation in war propaganda by scientists from belligerent countries. They considered science to be neutral and internationalist. Lorentz, Kapteyn, Willem de Sitter, Hugo Rudolph Kruyt and others resolved to get scientists from all countries on speaking terms again after the war. They tried to do so, with varying success, in a number of international scientific organizations. In their view, science had to be objective and rational, to demonstrate that scientists could do what politicians could not. The pervading mood was activist rather than pessimistic: because the rest of European intellectuals had been carried away with the madness of war, it was up to the Dutch to restore peace and civilization. This activism was exemplary of the traditionally strong internationalist peace movements among Dutch scientists. It was seen as a natural consequence of being a small country surrounded by much bigger nations.Footnote ⁴⁵

In this context, the synthetic style of thought gained ground. In the interwar years, Kohnstamm elaborated his philosophy of science into a system called Bijbels personalisme (‘biblical personalism’), connecting his views on causality and the foundations of science with theology, politics and education policy. In this period, philosophical and political activities increasingly demanded his attention. In 1913 he ran (unsuccessfully) for parliament for the Vrijzinnig Democratische Bond, a small but influential liberal political party. A few years later he became chairman of that party. In that capacity, he was involved in the establishment of universal suffrage in the Netherlands between 1917 and 1919. During his failed political campaign, Kohnstamm was impressed by the common sense of Frisian farmers. With some education, he argued, they would become critical citizens who were capable of making responsible political choices. He was so convinced of the importance of education that he changed career, ultimately trading his professorship in physics for one in pedagogy.Footnote ⁴⁶

The epitome of synthetic thought was the Encyclopaedisch Handboek van het Moderne Denken (Encyclopedic Handbook of Modern Thought), published in two volumes in 1931. The book contained articles on intellectual and philosophical notions such as holism, monism, intuitionism and causality. There were no articles on individual persons; rather than Einstein, Bergson or Steiner, it featured relativity theory, élan vital and anthroposophy. Often, a single article had several authors, who each approached the subject from different perspectives. This contributed to the aim of the editors – to give the book a ‘synthetic import’ (synthetische strekking).Footnote ⁴⁷

The authors of the Handboek came from a wide range of backgrounds, which illustrates the outlines of the synthetic movement. Many of them were scientists who shared liberal Christian–humanistic views on science and society. The list of contributors provides an overview of who was involved in the synthetic style of thought. Among them were the biologists Hugo Frederik Nierstrasz, Lourens G.M. Baas Becking and Hermann Jacques Jordan; the physicists Jan M. Burgers and Hendrik A. Kramers; the physicist-turned-economist Jan Tinbergen; and the engineer and future prime minister Willem Schermerhorn. Many of the authors had ties with social-democratic or liberal political parties such as the Social Democratic Party (SDAP) and the Vrijzinnig-Democratische Bond. Also, several of them were connected with the Woodbrookers movement. H.T. de Graaf, chief editor of the Handboek, also chaired the Woodbrookers. Remarkably, the list of authors included several students of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest (Burgers, Kramers and Tinbergen). In his home town of Leiden, Ehrenfest was the living heart of an active group of students and intellectuals who discussed the latest developments in science as well as social and political matters. Other prominent members of his entourage were Kohnstamm and the historian Jan Romein.Footnote ⁴⁸

Education and the crisis of the 1930s

Because of pillarization, the quest for synthesis became a very political project. Especially after the First World War, it always had a political and economic element. This sets it apart from the quest for synthesis in interwar Britain that Peter Bowler has described. He has shown that in interwar Britain, a new generation of ‘intellectually conservative, liberal religious’ scientists tried to combine science and religion in a new ‘synthesis’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, a general mood of pessimism in Britain in the 1930s led to renewed polarization and, even worse, to a waning of interest in their project.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the Netherlands, in contrast, the synthetic project was not intellectually conservative, nor did it decline. On the contrary, the economic and political crises of the 1930s provided the Dutch synthetic thinkers with a new sense of urgency. One probable reason for this was the political nature of the Dutch synthetic style. Reconciling science with religion was not a philosophical project that had little priority in times of political turmoil. In addition, the absence of hard-line scientific naturalists among Dutch intellectuals meant that a renewed polarization between science and religion did not occur in the interwar years.

The economic crisis of the 1930s reinforced the political and economic aspects of synthetic thought. Its impact was comparable with, possibly even stronger than, that of the First World War. The crisis hit the Netherlands hard and lasted longer than in most other countries. Conservative government policy was usually blamed for this; Prime Minister Colijn resisted abandoning the gold standard until 1936, by which time the Netherlands was the last remaining nation to adhere to it. At the same time, intellectuals were worried by emerging populist mass movements in Italy and Germany. Their concerns were reinforced by minor uprisings in Amsterdam and in the Dutch East Indies.

The crisis was perceived by many to shake the foundations of the economic and political system.Footnote ⁵¹ After 1930, a new pessimism pervaded Dutch culture. Spengler had been read extensively in the 1920s, of course, but only now did comparable Dutch publications appear. Most famous were De krisis der Westerse kultuur (The Crisis of Western Culture) by the religious socialist poet Henriette Roland Holst, and In de schaduwen van morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow) by the eminent historian Johan Huizinga.Footnote ⁵²

A brochure announcing a new journal called Synthese in 1937 illustrates the political turn of the synthetic movement. The brochure stated,

The new journal counted several scientists among its contributors, some of whom had also contributed to the Handboek van het Moderne Denken. Many intellectuals regarded the economic crisis and the rise of political mass movements as a result of sloppy and uninformed reasoning on the part of politicians and other leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of the voters lacked the skills to see through the rhetoric. A proper schooling in the scientific (read: synthetic) style of reasoning would provide a powerful antidote against simplistic populism, they argued. For that reason, many scientific intellectuals were actively involved in public debates about (scientific) education, including the physicists Kohnstamm, Leonard S. Ornstein and Adriaan Daniel Fokker, and the astronomer Marcel Minnaert.

The proposed education reforms were broader than just the expansion of the science part of the curriculum. Just as in the contemporary British debates on the ‘neglect of science’ in education, the debates were not a simple matter of ‘science vs. classical cultural Bildung’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Dutch intellectuals propagated an integration of scientific, cultural and social education. Just as one's Bildung was incomplete without proper scientific schooling, any scientific training was deficient unless combined with awareness of the cultural, philosophical and social aspects of science.

The biologist Hermann Jacques Jordan was among the most active intellectuals who lectured and published on synthetic thought and education.Footnote ⁵⁵ He regularly taught courses at the idealistically inclined Internationale School voor Wijsbegeerte (International School of Philosophy), an institute related to Van Eeden's Significa movement. Jordan was of German origin and he had studied biology in Würzburg, Bonn and Naples. In 1913, the Utrecht biologist Hugo Frederik Nierstrasz had called him to Holland to found a laboratory in comparative physiology.

According to Jordan, analysis was only the first half of understanding. Echoing German holistic biologists, he argued that scientists had confined themselves to analysis in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ They dissected a problem – such as the functioning of an organism – into smaller parts: separate organs, and individual chemical reactions within these organs. Once they understood the causal relations within each part, they claimed to understand the whole problem. But, argued Jordan, analysis had to be followed by synthesis: all the separate parts had to be understood in relation to each other, as one integrated whole. All causal relations were intertwined – an isolated process was something qualitatively different from a functioning ‘whole’, which, moreover, had to be observed over a substantial time period to be properly understood. Jordan often cited Hans Driesch's experiments on sea-urchin embryos as proof that the whole could not be explained by combining the parts. His interest in holism was also revealed by his frequent references to the notion of Ganzheit in German Gestaltpsychologie, for example in his discussion of animal instincts.Footnote ⁵⁷

The same lack of synthesis was also visible in contemporary politics, Jordan said. Politicians had failed to address the economic crisis effectively because they did not appreciate the complexity of the problem. But they could hardly be expected to, because they were not trained in the synthetic style of thought. Populist politicians were thus like scientists who confined themselves to analysis: they proposed a simplistic solution to a complex problem. If all citizens were trained in the ‘synthetic’ way of thinking, they would be able to see the flaws in the politician's populist rhetoric. Therefore education was the key to stability and civilization.

Jordan actively promoted the education method of the contemporary Italian reformist Maria Montessori, as it provided precisely the synthetic training he sought. Led by both scientific and theosophist ideas, Montessori had concluded that direct, personal experience was the best way of learning. Simply telling children or students facts would only provide them with fragments of unrelated knowledge, comparable to analytic science. Montessori wanted to stimulate children to explore the world by themselves. This would result in a deeper understanding of reality in all its complexity. Montessori became very popular in the Netherlands, and many Montessori schools were founded during the interwar years. Jordan had connections with several Montessori schools and organizations. He actively promoted the Montessori system in the Netherlands.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1949, a Montessori school was founded by his son, the Jordan College in Zeist.

According to Jordan, the Montessori system would create not only responsible, but truly free, citizens. When a child experienced a new fact directly, he or she would integrate what it had learnt into its existing knowledge, thereby creating a strong and robust world picture: a synthesis. In this way, every piece of the child's knowledge would be intimately related to every other piece, which meant that it would be difficult to influence or seduce the child with cheap rhetoric based on twisted information. Real freedom, according to Jordan, was just such robustness against outside influences.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this way, education reform would both enhance freedom and strengthen democracy.

Technocracy

As a result of the economic and political crisis of the 1930s, synthetic thought was increasingly seen as a crucial part of much-needed social and cultural reform in the Netherlands. Just as the foundations of science had had to be rethought in the early twentieth century, now the foundations of the economic and political system were called into question. In many cases, this meant that synthetic thought became connected with technocratic ideals, creating a synthetic technocrat movement. Both synthetic and technocratic thought were founded on rejection. Synthetic thinkers rejected specialization and narrow-minded materialism, while technocrats rejected politics based on individual or corporate interests instead of the common good or the Gemeinschaft.

Holistic thought, combined with enthusiasm for modern science and technology, was a familiar phenomenon in interwar western Europe. Herf and Harrington have described similar movements in Germany. However, the Dutch synthetic technocrats were more inclined to leftist politics than to the reactionary right-wing ideology of their German counterparts. They are more comparable to the English Fabians, or even to the followers of the more radical ideas of J.D. Bernal.Footnote ⁶⁰ The majority of Dutch synthetic intellectuals were very moderate, both in political and philosophical views. However, few Dutch scientific intellectuals were as fiercely antireligious as E. Ray Lankester or Marxist scientists such as Bernal or J.B.S. Haldane.Footnote ⁶¹ Even in the late nineteenth century, there had been no strong tradition of radical scientific naturalism in the Netherlands comparable to that in Victorian England.

In the interwar years, technocratic ideals became increasingly popular in Holland. In 1934, a Technocratic Society was founded, modelled in part on the Technical Alliance of Thorstein Veblen.Footnote ⁶² Outside this society, the ideals of technocracy were shared among a broad range of intellectuals. Few of them wanted to replace the political system entirely or replace all politicians by engineers. The most popular variety of technocracy involved economic planning by the state, with scientists and engineers in an advisory capacity. This gained much support after the First World War. The Economische Bond, a political party that favoured technocratic planning, gained three seats (out of one hundred) in parliament in 1918.Footnote ⁶³

The reasoning was simple. According to many commentators, the fact that the majority of politicians had studied law explained why they did not understand science and technology, two increasingly important elements of modern society. This lack of understanding was amply illustrated by the disastrous way in which they had handled the First World War and the economic crisis of the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁴ During the last years of the war, coal and other raw materials were in short supply, as international trade routes were blocked. The Dutch government reacted by submitting large sections of the economy to centralized coordination and planning. After the war, proponents of planning hailed the success of this effort as an argument for technocracy.Footnote ⁶⁵

A decade later, during the economic crisis of the early 1930s, technocrats felt confirmed in their plea for central economic planning. They blamed politicians and poorly educated industrial leaders for the disaster. To many intellectuals active in science this proved that leadership alone was not good enough – expert leadership was needed.Footnote ⁶⁶ What they wanted was gebildete Tatkraft, a combination of synthetic thinking and practical decisiveness.Footnote ⁶⁷ This type of leadership was explicitly intellectual, which sets it apart from other calls for strong leadership in Europe at the time.

Isaäc Pieter de Vooys, whom I cited in the opening section of this paper, referred to Walther Rathenau, Herbert Hoover and Leonid Krassin as inspiring examples of gebildete Tatkraft. They were all engineers who were involved in directing large-scale economic planning during the First World War.Footnote ⁶⁸ During the interwar period, De Vooys developed his technocratic ideas further, calling for reforms in the education of engineers, as potential future expert leaders. His work is saturated with synthetic views on science, technology, art and gemeenschap (community; it has roughly the same connotations as the German Gemeinschaft). De Vooys repeatedly emphasized the importance of national community as a more deeply felt unit than the superficial society or Gesellschaft. He was active in politics, and although never in elected office, he was twice nominated potential cabinet minister for the Social Democrat Party.Footnote ⁶⁹ De Vooys advocated strong central planning, including the nationalization of several key sectors of the economy. He acknowledged that this would create tensions with democratic governments, but he asserted that ‘engineering methods’ in politics would only strengthen democracy.

According to De Vooys, engineers were the embodiment of synthesis, combining creativity and imagination with scientific rationality and practical skills. For that reason, they were best equipped to guide modern society – especially if the rapidly developing social sciences were added to their education.Footnote ⁷⁰ De Vooys often referred to his close friend the former Tachtiger poet Albert Verwey, whose views on verbeelding (imagination) and creativity were a central notion in his work, together with gemeenschap.Footnote ⁷¹ Engineers could also act as a guard against demagoguism, for example by pointing out the impractical nature of simplistic populist schemes.

De Vooys cited the Belgian socialist theoretician Hendrik de Man as one of his inspirations. De Man was best known for the ‘Plan de Man’, an extensive economic plan to revive the Belgian economy after the crisis. The most important Dutch technocratic publication of the 1930s, the Plan van de Arbeid of the SDAP, was also inspired by De Man's plan. The Dutch plan was authored by future economics Nobel Prize laureate Jan Tinbergen and several prominent engineers. It marked a turning point in socialist politics, for with it the SDAP formally abandoned revolution, opting instead for parliamentary action and technocratic planning. Moreover, Tinbergen founded the plan on accepted classical economic theory. He emphasized that economics was an ‘engineering science’, not an ideology.Footnote ⁷² The plan was intended to mediate between labour and employer interest, and also to bring together technology, culture and society.Footnote ⁷³

Publishing synthetic literature and technocratic plans was not enough, of course. The ideals of synthetic technocracy needed to be put into practice. The need for Tatkraft and leadership was a recurrent theme in the public debates of the 1930s, and Goethe's line ‘im Anfang war die Tat’ (‘in the beginning was the deed’) was a fashionable quote at the time.Footnote ⁷⁴ But where could the required combination of Tatkraft and Bildung be found? De Vooys pointed to engineers, and many engineers agreed with him. They claimed to have just the right mixture of scientific knowledge, technical skills and leadership qualities, as was demonstrated by their capable handling of large-scale infrastructural works such as the impressive damming of the Zuiderzee and the accompanying land reclamation projects.

The engineer's claim to Bildung did not remain unchallenged, however.Footnote ⁷⁵ University professors did not doubt the scientific level of the Polytechnic in Delft where engineers were trained, but they questioned the ‘academic environment’. Could a college without philosophy and arts faculties provide the intellectual breadth and depth needed for Bildung? What if the education was too specialized? Scientific knowledge was not enough; students should be trained in critical, synthetic thought. The Polytechnic reacted by introducing courses in economics, history and philosophy. The same happened a few years later at the Agricultural College in Wageningen.Footnote ⁷⁶ The two institutes gradually became similar to the established universities, in a development that Harwood and Maat have called ‘academic drift’.Footnote ⁷⁷

But the universities changed, too. Science students were no longer expected to become only scientists or teachers, as they had been in the nineteenth century. A career in industry or the civil service had become a realistic option. After graduating, university students would have to compete with Delft engineers, especially during the economic depression of the early 1930s, which hit hard amongst academics. With their students' job prospects in mind, university professors introduced courses in applied science and established collaborations with large industrial companies such as Philips. The Utrecht physicist Leonard S. Ornstein, for example, introduced courses in applied physics and started collaborations with several industrial companies. Of his ninety-two PhD students, eighteen found jobs with Philips and seventeen with Royal Dutch/Shell.Footnote ⁷⁸

As a result of these developments, the difference between the traditional universities and the Delft and Wageningen institutes gradually disappeared. Gebildete Tatkraft became their common goal. In 1931, chemist Hugo Rudolph Kruyt of Utrecht University held a famous lecture on ‘the importance of intellectual leaders in society and their education at university’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Inspired by a visit to the United States, he described how universities should become ‘living elements’ of society, where future leaders for all domains of society were educated. He did not see why applied science could not be integrated in the traditional universities; after all, medicine was a practice-oriented science too. Kruyt wanted to introduce an American-style system of bachelor's and master's programmes, in which master's courses were reserved for those who wanted to pursue a career in science. The bachelor diploma would provide the necessary Bildung for journalists, politicians, civil servants and many other occupations. In this way, everyone would benefit from an academic education. This was especially important, he said, for future leaders of the working classes. For if universities could not provide these leaders, who knew to whom the workers would turn for guidance?

Kruyt's ideas were adopted by several speakers at a conference in 1936 on ‘the university problem’.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was organized to discuss the outcomes of a report on ‘the future of university graduates’ that was published earlier that year.Footnote ⁸¹ The conclusions of this report were alarming. The number of graduates was rising rapidly, while the number of available jobs was lagging behind as a result of the depression. However, the participants of the conference agreed that limiting admission to the universities was not an acceptable solution to the problem. Instead, they argued that graduates should be employed outside the traditional academic professions. Following Kruyt, who was one of the speakers, they advocated an active role for intellectual leaders in all domains of society. Yet they did not come up with concrete proposals for how this role should be realized.

Many scientists struggled with the problem of how the potential benefits of science for society and culture should be realized. In Britain, research into this question led to the ‘social relations of science’ movement, of which Bernal was the most vocal proponent.Footnote ⁸² Dutch intellectuals were inspired by their British colleagues. For example, after a stay at the London School of Economics in the early 1930s, the sociologist Sjoerd Hofstra published a book on The Social Aspects of Knowledge and Science.Footnote ⁸³ Bernal's work inspired Dutch physicist Burgers to found an organization for research on the relation between science and society. He was joined by, among others, Kruyt and Tinbergen. Kruyt and Tinbergen also contributed to a lecture series organized by Fokker in 1939 on De betekenis en rol der wetenschap in de maatschappij (the significance and role of science in society).Footnote ⁸⁴

One plan that was realized in this period was the creation of an organization for toegepast natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek (TNO – applied scientific research), a joint project of universities, industrial companies and the state. Both Kruyt and De Vooys played a leading role in its foundation. The plan for such an organization was much older: it originated from the First World War, when a committee of the Royal Academy of Science investigated how scientists could contribute to the war economy.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Academy committee was chaired by Lorentz. The committee's proposals came to nothing because the war ended, but the idea for an organization of applied science was later revived by engineers C.J. van Nieuwenburg and De Vooys. Strengthened by a sense of urgency provided by the economic crisis, the organization started its activities in 1932.

Synthetic technocracy

The ideology of synthetic technocrat leadership became very influential in Dutch society. During the Second World War, a group of prominent intellectuals made extensive plans for postwar reconstruction while being held hostage by the Germans in Sint Michielsgestel. The synthetic technocrats, including Kohnstamm, figured prominently among them. One of the central themes of their plans was the abolishment of pillarized politics. They became known as the Doorbraakbeweging (‘breakthrough movement’), referring to the architectural metaphor of the pillars.Footnote ⁸⁶

Geert Somsen has compared the Doorbraakbeweging to the Unity of Science Movement, the internationalist movement related to the Vienna circle and the Bauhaus artists.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both were modernist, politically left-wing movements, born out of comparable concerns about society and culture. However, Somsen rightly states that the two movements were ‘completely antithetical’ where their views on epistemology were concerned. For the Doorbraak thinkers, the Viennese logical positivism was no more than a variety of the nineteenth-century positivism that they had rejected a long time before. Instead, they sought to combine science with a programme of cultural and political values, which was exactly what the Vienna circle rejected as outdated. Holism was the antithesis of their programme of transparent construction of meanings from fundamental single elements.Footnote ⁸⁸

Peter Galison has written that the Vienna circle's aims of complete scientific neutrality were no longer heeded in the 1930s, as their programmes became increasingly political. There turned out to be no ‘demilitarized zone’ of social, artistic or technical neutrality.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Doorbraakbeweging, however, claimed that there was, and continued to do so until well after the Second World War. However, this zone was very different from what the Viennese philosophers had in mind. It was neutral and scientific, but not value-free or apolitical.

Immediately after the war, a new government was recruited from Doorbraak circles. The former social-democratic and liberal parties (SDAP and VDB) merged with the small Christian Democratic Union into a new Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA), intended to be the political vehicle for the breakthrough. Willem Schermerhorn became prime minister. He was a professor of geodesy from the Delft Polytechnic and had published a synthetic technocrat book in 1933.Footnote ⁹⁰ Other cabinet ministers included engineer Hein Vos, co-author of the Plan van de Arbeid, and theologian Gerardus van der Leeuw, who became minister for education. But this government did not last very long. The traditional socialists in the PvdA soon took the lead again, and other pre-war pillarized political parties were also quickly revived. The ‘breakthrough’ appeared to have failed.

However, at other levels of society, the ideals of the Doorbraakbeweging did have a lasting impact.Footnote ⁹¹ Expert leadership became the standard at many levels in society, especially in government agencies. Physicist-turned-economist Jan Tinbergen founded the National Planning Bureau, an organization that was (and still is) highly influential in economic and labour policy making. Marshall Plan funds were also spent along technocratic lines. Finally, education policy was reformed in the 1950s, adopting many of the ideas of Kohnstamm and other syntheticists. Over the years the ‘synthetic’ element became less pronounced, while the technocratic element remained strong. Ironically, the re-emergence of pillarized politics may have been an important factor in this development, as technocratic advice was used to depoliticize sensitive issues, so as to prevent clashes between the ideologies.Footnote ⁹²

The postwar generation of politicians and other policy makers were often inspired by the ideas that had been developed by synthetic technocratic thinkers in the interwar years. Synthetic technocracy remained the subject of intense intellectual debates.Footnote ⁹³ This is especially visible in an influential group of social scientists, known as the ‘Utrecht school’. Ido Weijers has called them the ‘interior decorators’ of postwar Dutch society.Footnote ⁹⁴ The physiologist Buytendijk, who turned to psychology after the war, was one of the founding members of this group. Other members were psychologists and sociologists such as Willem Petrus Joseph Pompe, P.A.H. Baan, Martinus Jan Langeveld, Henricus Cornelius Rümke and Cornelis Trimbos. They were inspired by, among others, ‘breakthrough’ intellectuals such as Kohnstamm, Schermerhorn and Willem Banning.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Doorbraakbeweging was inspired by the synthetic technocrat movement, whose roots go back to the wijsgeerige beweging and the generation of scientists that joined philosophical debates around the turn of the century. After the First World War and – especially – during the economic and political crises of the 1930s, synthetic thought became increasingly political in nature. Most notably, synthetic (holistic) ideas were combined with technocratic ideals during the interwar years. The period of reconstruction after the Second World War seemed to be the perfect moment to put these ideals into practice, but this failed, at least at the highest political level. However, synthetic technocrat thought remained influential behind the scenes of the pillarized Dutch society. It was a mixture of liberal, social and religious elements, often related to social-democratic or liberal politics. It did not reject the fundamental rule of reason – on the contrary. Partly formulated in direct reaction to political developments in Germany in the 1930s, most intellectuals emphasized that it was not antidemocratic. Because they believed that a democracy could only function properly if both voters and politicians were schooled in the correct way of scientific (synthetic) reasoning, education was of crucial importance to synthetic technocrats. If properly educated, voters would turn away from populists and recognize the need for expert leadership.

The development of the synthetic technocrat movement cannot be understood outside the specific Dutch political context. As in Germany, holistic thought was born out of an obsession with social and political unity, but not that of a larger nation, rather of an ideologically divided society.Footnote ⁹⁶ The wish to avoid ideological clashes was central to the project in the Netherlands, which probably explains its eclectic and moderate nature. Radical antireligious naturalism and antimetaphysical positivism were rejected in favour of a programme that Somsen has aptly called ‘value-laden science’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Synthetic technocracy combined elements from other styles of thought that are often seen as mutually exclusive. It was a style of thought that had direct consequences for society and culture, and which provided scientists with an answer to the question of what role they could and should play in a modern society. The Dutch case illustrates the complex relation between public science and the cultural and political context of which it is an integral part. At the same time, the comparison between developments in Holland and in the better-known larger neighbouring countries demonstrates how variable this relation can be, thus broadening our understanding of science, society and culture in early twentieth-century Europe.