Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

Works

• 1881Suicide as a Mass Social Phenomenon of Modern Civilisation

  Explains the rising suicide rates of modern Europe by the loss of religious faith and moral orientation – sixteen years before Durkheim’s study.

• 1913The Spirit of Russia

  A history of Russian philosophy of history and religion from Chaadaev and the Slavophiles to the revolutionaries, as a study of Russia’s relation to Europe.

Position

Masaryk joined Brentano’s empiricism and Comte’s positivism with a non-confessional religious ethics. “Suicide as a Mass Social Phenomenon” (1881) explained rising suicide rates by the decline of religious faith in modern civilisation, a sociological question that Durkheim (1897) answered differently. In “The Czech Question” (1895) and related works he read Czech history as a struggle for the ideal of humanity, from Jan Hus and the Brethren to the national revival; the historian Josef Pekař objected that this was a philosophy imposed on history, and the dispute about the meaning of Czech history continued into the twentieth century. “The Philosophical and Sociological Foundations of Marxism” (1899) criticised historical materialism as a deterministic doctrine that neglected individual responsibility, and his study of Russian thought (1913) traced Russia’s crisis to the conflict between Orthodox theocracy and European modernity. In the Hilsner case he opposed popular antisemitism at considerable cost to his public standing. Jan Patočka compared his diagnosis of the European crisis with Husserl’s and wrote critically on his philosophy of Czech history. Historians have also discussed the limits of the state he led, especially the position of its German and Slovak citizens.

Life & context

Tomáš Masaryk was born on 7 March 1850 in Hodonín in Moravia, the son of a Slovak coachman on an imperial estate and a Moravian mother. After a brief apprenticeship he attended gymnasia in Brno and Vienna and studied philosophy in Vienna, where Franz Brentano became his model; he received his doctorate in 1876 with a thesis on Plato’s concept of the soul. In Leipzig in 1876–77 he befriended the younger Edmund Husserl and met the American Charlotte Garrigue, whom he married in 1878 and whose name he added to his own. He habilitated in Vienna in 1879 with the study on suicide. In 1882 he became professor at the new Czech university in Prague, where he helped expose the forged “ancient” manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora and in 1899 challenged the ritual-murder verdict against Leopold Hilsner. He sat in the Austrian parliament in 1891–93 and 1907–14. In the First World War he campaigned abroad for Czech and Slovak independence; on 14 November 1918 he was elected president of Czechoslovakia and re-elected in 1920, 1927 and 1934. He resigned in 1935 and died at Lány on 14 September 1937.

Further main works

• Attempt at a Concrete Logic (Versuch einer concreten Logik, 1887)
• The Czech Question (Česká otázka, 1895)
• The Philosophical and Sociological Foundations of Marxism (Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus, 1899)
• The Making of a State (Světová revoluce, 1925)