Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism Zionism War Peace and the Bomb

About this book

The most famous scientist of the twentieth century Albert Einstein was also one of the centurys most outspoken political activists. Deeply engaged with the events of his tumultuous times from the two world wars and the Holocaust to the atomic bomb and the Cold War to the effort to establish a Jewish homeland Einstein was a remarkably prolific political writer someone who took courageous and often unpopular stands against nationalism militarism anti-Semitism racism and McCarthyism. In Einstein on Politics leading Einstein scholars David Rowe and Robert Schulmann gather Einsteins most important public and private political writings and put them into historical context. The book reveals a little-known Einstein--not the ineffectual and nave idealist of popular imagination but a principled shrewd pragmatist whose stands on political issues reflected the depth of his humanity. Nothing encapsulates Einsteins profound involvement in twentieth-century politics like the atomic bomb. Here we read the former militant pacifists 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that Germany might try to develop an atomic bomb. But the book also documents how Einstein tried to explain this action to Japanese pacifists after the United States used atomic weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki events that spurred Einstein to call for international control of nuclear technology. A vivid firsthand view of how one of the twentieth centurys greatest minds responded to the greatest political challenges of his day Einstein on Politics will forever change our picture of Einsteins public activism and private motivations.