When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Cassirer vacated his teaching position at the University of Hamburg and moved to Sweden. Later, fearing that Jews would be unsafe in that country, he moved to England and taught at Oxford for two years. Then, beginning in 1941, Cassirer taught at Yale and, lastly, at Columbia University (NYC) until his death in 1945.

Cassirer was a classical liberal in the German tradition of Kant, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. (See my essay The Culture of Liberty: Wilhelm von Humboldt.) In contrast to English liberalism and its stress on economic freedom and politics, German liberals focused more on the cultural aspects and benefits of a free society. Individuality, moral autonomy, and cultural diversity were dominant and recurring themes in German liberalism.

Until his last work, The Myth of the State, Cassirer wrote very little on political subjects. He began writing this book in 1944, after being commissioned by Fortune Magazine to write an article on National Socialism, or Nazism. Cassirer expanded this article into a book, finishing it in 1945, just days before his death in April of that year. As Edward Skidelsky (cited above, p. 223) said of The Myth of the State: The origins of Nazism “are sought not in the barracks and beer cellars of Munich and Vienna, but in the works of Machiavelli, Hegel, Carlyle, and Arthur de Gobineau.”

I shall not discuss the intellectual antecedents of National Socialism until my next essay. Here I shall focus on Cassirer’s application of his theory of mythological thinking to modern totalitarianism. Cassirer had a keen interest in the nature and social role of myths; indeed, the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is titled Mythical Thought. I shall quote liberally from the final chapter of The Myth of the State (“The Technique of the Modern Political Myths)” in this summary of Cassirer’s views. As we shall see, Cassirer’s ideas apply not only to fascism or to Nazism, but more broadly to totalitarian governments in general.

According to Cassirer, after World War I “Germany’s whole social and economic system was threatened with a complete collapse….This was the natural soil upon which the political myths could grow up and in which they found ample nourishment.” Mythological thinking “reaches its full force when man has to face an unusual and dangerous situation.” This is as true in modern civilizations and “advanced stages of man’s political life” as it was in earlier, more “primitive” societies.