Otto Pächt, ‘Hegelian’ Exile in Cold War England

Abstract

Utilizing documents from his personal Nachlass, I sketch Otto Pächt’s career in Great Britain, from his emigration in 1936 to his call back to the University of Vienna in 1963. As a member of the Vienna School of Art History, who had contributed with Hans Sedlmayr to the elaboration of a methodological viewpoint based on immanent form and real historical processes, Pächt faced difficulties in England, heightened by the rise and hegemony of neo-liberal thought. In Pächt’s case this thinking affected him directly through the institutional role that E. H. Gombrich held at the Warburg and in British intellectual life in general.