Gerard Radnitzky: From Philosophy of Science to Political Philosophy

Abstract

Gerard Radnitzky used to characterize himself as an individualist in a collectivist age. He was born as Gerard Alfred Karl Norbert Maria Hans Radnitzky on 2 July 1921 in Znaim, a medieval town in Southern Moravia close to the Austrian border. In 1918 Southern Moravia had become incorporated in the first Czechoslovak Republic. Since the region had for centuries been a part of Lower Austria, its population, consisting of Lower Austrians, was German-speaking. But it had equally intimate contacts with other parts of Moravia. In Moravia, Czechs and Germans had lived together in peaceful cooperation for centuries. Moravia was a typical Central European region and a culturally fertile ground. Names that come to mind are Gregor Mendel, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Emst Mach, Joseph Schumpeter, and Kurt Godei. To make their career they had to leave the province and consequently turn to Vierina.1 Radnitzky grew up in a family background that remained emotionally attached to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For centuries, the house of Habsburg had defended those regions against the French, the Russians, and the Germans, and the Empire was for most of the time everything but an interventionist state. At the end of WWI, the population of Southern Moravia had placed its hopes in a confederal system for Central Europe (like the one that crown prince Rudolf had conceived as a pupil and disciple of Carl Menger). The newly constituted Czechoslovak Republic, in which they suddenly found themselves after Southern Moravia had been annexed in 1918 by the then emerging Prague government, which at the time had the required military power, held out the promise of a state of several