STERN, Alfred
Réflexions sur la philosophie de la politique
Bruxelles, Enthousiasme, s.d. (1939)
in-8, brochure agrafée, 23 p.; bon état
Rare philosophical pamphlet by Alfred Stern on the responsibility of political philosophy in the face of national-socialism and its rejection of humanist values. Alfred Stern (1899-1980) is an Austrian-American philosopher who before the second world war was teaching alternate semesters in Paris at the Sorbonne and at the University of Brussels. After serving the Allied Forces during the Second War, he moved via Mexico to the United States in 1944 where he became a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at the University of Porto Rico in Mayagüez. He was also awarded in Austria with an Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst. The brochure is inscribed to Max Gottschalk (1889-1976), a Belgian social scientist who worked for the International Labor Office and did research at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Brussels. During WWII he was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York. Gottschalk was vice president of the Jewish Colonization Association and a founder of the Centrale d’Oeuvres Sociales Juives in Brussels. As president of the Belgian Committee for Refugees from Nazi Germany, he was instrumental in the rescue of the passengers from the ship St. Louis, which was sent back from Cuba and finally permitted to land in Antwerp. Gottschalk wrote numerous publications in Jewish and non-Jewish fields.
