Interwar Europe through the Eyes of Kurt Gödel

Although the story of Kurt Gödel’s discovery in late 1947 of a logical contradiction in the United States Constitution has been retold many times, the content of this discovery is often discounted as nonsense or as highly improbable.[1] This assessment, however, ignores Gödel’s Central European background and the dramatic constitutional histories of Central European states during the interbellum period, for during his years at the University Vienna (1924-1940)–first as a student and then as a lecturer–Gödel would have noticed that every single constitutional democracy in Central Europe ended in dictatorship.[2]

Although Gödel lived only 15 years in Vienna, in many ways those were the most productive and important years of his life. In summary, Kurt Gödel had matriculated at the University of Vienna in the fall of 1924, and by the summer of 1929, he had completed his doctoral thesis logically proving the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus. (Gödel’s dissertation was approved by his academic advisors on 6 July 1929,[3] and he was granted his Ph.D. on 6 February 1930.[4]) He then proved his now-famous “incompleteness theorem” in 1931, and finally obtained his Habilitation as well as the right to lecture in 1933.[5] In the words of fellow Austrian scholar Karl Sigmund, “Kurt Gödel spent barely fifteen years in Vienna … However, the years [in Vienna] … constituted his formative period. He was deeply affected by the extraordinary cultural and intellectual following of what has been called ‘Vienna’s Golden Autumn,’ and he may one day be seen as its most prestigious scion.”[6] Vienna is where Gödel attended university and received his doctoral degree, where he attended the philosophical discussions of the Vienna Circle, where he met and his wed his wife Adele, where he did his most important and original work, where he made landmark contributions in the fields of logic and mathematics.

To sum up, Vienna was not only Gödel’s primary residence from 1924 to 1940; it was also the grand capital city where Gödel came of age. But what many students of Gödel’s life and work fail to mention is that Vienna–the imperial capital of the former-Austro-Hungarian Empire–must have also offered Gödel a perfect vantage point from which to observe, even casually, the degeneration of constitutional democracies into constitutional dictatorships across Europe. In the fall of 1924, when the young Gödel began his studies at the University of Vienna, the vast majority of states in Europe were parliamentary democracies. But by the time Gödel and his wife Adele left their beloved Vienna fifteen years later in January 1940, thirteen European democracies had become dictatorships and every single constitutional democracy in Central Europe, Gödel’s corner of the world, had become a constitutional dictatorship.[7] In the words of two eminent European historians, “[Central] Europe was strangled by various dictatorships: some fascist/Nazi dictatorships, some puppet, and a variety of semi-fascist or right-wing nationalist and royalist authoritarian regimes.”[8]

Did Gödel have the time or the inclination to take notice of these dramatic anti-constitutional moments occurring across Europe during his days at the University of Vienna? How could he not have? Although “Gödel devoted himself intently on his studies … he was not asocial,”[9] for “he spent a good deal of time in the coffeehouses that were then so central to Viennese intellectual and cultural life.”[10] So it is certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that Gödel read about these extra-constitutional coups in one of Vienna’s leading newspapers or that he overheard talk about these dramatic events in one of his favorite coffeehouses.

Source: F. E. Guerra-Pujol, “Gödel’s Interbellum” (revised draft, 2023); footnotes below the fold:

[1] See, e.g., Oskar Morgenstern (1971), History of the naturalization of Kurt Gödel, Draft memorandum dated Sept. 13, 1971, https://perma.cc/PF3F-FFFM.

[2] Joseph Rothschild (1962), p. 241, n.2: The ideological, political, and economic background of Pilsudski’s coup d’etat of 1926, Political Science Quarterly, 78(2): 224–244 (“all the states of this area [Central Europe] … succumbed to royal or military or political dictatorships”).

[3] See John W. Dawson, Jr. (1997), p. 55: Logical dilemmas: the life and work of Kurt Gödel, A. K. Peters

[4] Ibid., p. 60.

[5] Ibid., pp. 86-89.

[6] Karl Sigmund (2011), p. 75: Dozent Gödel will not lecture, in Matthias Baaz, et al., Kurt Gödel and the foundation of mathematics, Cambridge University Press, 75–93.

[7] Nancy Bermeo (1997), p. 1: Getting mad or going mad? Citizens, scarcity and the breakdown of democracy in Interwar Europe, CSD Center for the Study of Democracy.

[8] Antonio Costa Pinto and Stein Ugelvik Larsen (2006), p. 251: Conclusion: fascism, dictators, and charisma,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7(2): 251–257.

[9] Ibid., p. 31

[10] Ibid.