prior probability

Below is the next installment of my paper “Gödel’s Interbellum” (revised draft, 2023); footnotes below the fold:

I will begin my survey with the self-coup of January 6, 1929, when King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia unilaterally abrogated his country’s constitution and assumed full dictatorial powers. This self-coup provides an early and ominous interwar example of a “recursive” transfer of power in which a previous extraconstitutional act is declared to be constitutional by a future constitutional act. Also, aside from Austria, the Central European country that Kurt Gödel may have been most likely familiar with was Yugoslavia. Austria not only shared a common border with Yugoslavia, during the summer of 1933 Gödel actually visited there and vacationed in the resort town of Bled with his mother.[1]

Following World War I, Yugoslavia was officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and his motley kingdom consisted of a diverse and far-flung federation of crown provinces (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the formerly independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, along with an assorted collection of territories that were once part of Austria-Hungary, including Carniola, a portion of Styria, and most of Dalmatia (all from Austrian part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) as well as Croatia, Slavonia, and Vojvodina (all from the Hungarian part of the former empire).[2] Yugoslavia’s first parliamentary constitution was enacted in June of 1921 and was called the Vidovdan Constitution after the feast of St. Vitus, a Serbian Orthodox holiday that takes place every June.[3] The Vidovdan Constitution established a constitutional monarchy, led by King Aleksandar I, also known as King Aleksandar the Unifier,[4] who assumed the throne in August of 1921 and ruled Yugoslavia–first as king, then as dictator–until his assassination in October 1934.

Alas, Yugoslavia’s transition from democracy to dictatorship began as early as 20 June 1928, when the Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić was shot by a Montenegrin Serb leader and People’s Radical Party politician Puniša Račić during a tense argument on the floor of Yugoslavia’s parliament.[5] Radić’s assassination not only embroiled Yugoslavia in political turmoil; it also allowed King Aleksandar to take full advantage of the crisis. He carried out a self-coup on 6 January 1929, proroguing the parliament,[6] abrogating the Vidovdan Constitution, and assuming full dictatorial powers.[7] Two years later, King Aleksandar formalized his dictatorship by promulgating a new constitution by decree on September 3, 1931. Yugoslavia’s new constitution, which was also known as the September Constitution or Octroic constitution, would remain in effect for another ten years, until the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers in 1941.

Did Gödel take notice of these events in neighboring Yugoslavia? Although Gödel did cross the Austro-Yugoslav border once, when he vacationed in Bled in 1933, it is unclear whether he took notice of any of these events. At the time of Aleksandar’s 6 January proclamation, for example, Gödel was in Vienna, beginning his work on his doctoral dissertation,[8] and when Aleksandar later decreed a new constitution in September of 1931, Gödel was preparing to attend a meeting of the German Mathematical Union in the spa town of Bad Elster, which is located in the state of Saxony in Germany, to give a lecture on his incompleteness theorem.[9]

Whether Gödel was aware of the September Constitution or the Yugoslavian self-coup, King Aleksandar’s decree of September 3, 1931–when he promulgated a new constitutional charter to replace the one he had abrogated in 1929–poses a deep constitutional conundrum or paradox: was this decree itself constitutional? After all, Aleksandar was acting outside his country’s constitutional process when he abrogated the Vidovdan Constitution on 6 January1929. Stated formally, Aleksandar’s abrogation of the Vidovdan Constitution effected an extraconstitutional transfer of power from parliament to king. So, from a theoretical perspective, was the 3 September decree itself an unconstitutional act, or did the decree create a new constitutional order, one that “legalized” his self-coup ex post?

I am interrupting my series of blog posts on the demise of Central European democracies during the interwar period to make the following statement: last night’s censure of Representative Rashida Tlaib is unamerican. Simply put, although I stand with Israel, the progressive Congresswoman should be free to express her views without fear or favor.

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:

Below is the introduction to my paper “Gödel’s Interbellum: Interwar Europe through the Eyes of Kurt Gödel” (footnotes omitted; emphasis added):

“One of the great unsolved mysteries of constitutional law is ‘Gödel’s loophole‘. In brief, the great logician Kurt Gödel reportedly discovered a deep flaw in the United States Constitution, a logical contradiction that could lead to a constitutional dictatorship. In a previous work, I conjectured what the substance of this loophole might be. Here, by contrast, I will address a different constitutional question: how plausible is Gödel’s loophole as a practical matter? More to the point, how likely is it that a would-be dictator could exploit Gödel’s constitutional loophole in these turbulent times? It turns out, very likely, if the constitutional history of interwar Central Europe is any guide. By way of example, by the time Gödel was awarded the right to lecture at the University of Vienna in March 1933, democracy had died in at least nine or ten states in interbellum Europe, depending on whether Atatürk’s Turkey is classified a dictatorship: Hungary under Admiral Horthy, Italy under ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini, Lithuania under President Smetona, Poland under First Marshal Piłsudski, Portugal under Prime Minister Salazar, Spain under Captain General Primo de Rivera, and Yugoslavia under King Aleksandar had all become constitutional dictatorships.”

Bonus video: “Chaos and Classicism: The Interwar Period” by Professor Atina Grossmann:

My most downloaded work of all time, Gödel’s Loophole, describes the logician Kurt Gödel’s discovery of a logical contradiction in the United States Constitution, a discovery he reportedly made while he was studying for his U.S. citizenship exam in 1947. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the publication of my loophole paper, I wrote a “prequel” titled Gödel’s Interbellum. My prequel surveys the demise of three Central European democracies through the eyes of Gödel: King Aleksandar’s “January 6” dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß’s declaration of the “self-elimination of Parliament” in March of 1933, and King Carol’s seizure of emergency powers in Romania in 1938. In short, I conjecture that Gödel was not only aware of these dramatic events in his corner of the world (Central Europe); I also surmise that the possibility of a self-coup–what I refer to as a “recursive” transfer of power–must have informed Gödel’s discovery of a loophole in the U.S. Constitution.

Bonus video: MetaMaths video on “Gödel’s constitutional Loophole”:

My colleague Dan Markel was murdered in his own home in Tallahassee, Florida on 18 July 2014. Yesterday, a jury found Markel’s brother-in-law, Charlie Adelson, guilty of conspiring to murder Markel.

Wendi Adelson, you’re next! One of the things we learned from Charlie’s trial is that his sister Wendi (Markel’s evil ex-wife) knew about the murder plot and did nothing to stop it from happening.

I am reblogging this recent post “Redhill Close SIT Estate Walks into History” from one of my favorite specialty blogs, Remember Singapore:

By October 2023, a large part of Redhill Close estate has been bulldozed, with only a couple of blocks left standing. Another old Singapore …

Redhill Close SIT Estate Walks Into History