Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in political science, history, philosophy, and related subjects.

The Myth of the State is by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. It tried in part to understand the intellectual origins of Nazi Germany. Cassirer saw Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth was not checked or subdued by superior forces. The book discusses Greek philosophy, Plato’s Republic, the medieval theory of the state, Machiavelli, Thomas Carlyle’s writings on hero worship, the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, and Hegel, among authors represented in the TU Library collection.

The TU Library collection includes other books by and about Ernst Cassirer.

The book begins:

In the last thirty years, in the period between the first and the second World Wars, we have not only passed through a severe crisis of our political and social life but have also been confronted with quite new theoretical problems. We experienced a radical change in the forms of political thought. New questions were raised and new answers were given. Problems that had been unknown to the political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came suddenly to the fore. Perhaps the most important and the most alarming feature in this development of modem political thought is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought. The preponderance of mythical thought over rational thought in some of our modern political systems is obvious. After a short and violent struggle mythical thought seemed to win a clear and definitive victory. How was this victory possible? How can we account for the new phenomenon that so suddenly appeared on our political horizon and in a sense seemed to reverse all our former ideas of the character of our intellectual and our social life?

If we look at the present state of our cultural life we feel at once that there is a deep chasm between two different fields. When it comes to political action man seems to follow rules quite different from those recognized in all his mere theoretical activities. No one would think of solving a problem of natural science or a technical problem by the methods that are recommended and put into action in the solution of political questions. In the first case we never aim to use anything but rational methods. Rational thought holds its ground here and seems constantly to enlarge its field. Scientific knowledge and technical mastery of nature daily win new and unprecedented victories. But in man’s practical and social life the defeat of rational thought seems to be complete and irrevocable. In this domain modern man is supposed to forget everything he has learned in the development of his intellectual life. He is admonished to go back to the first rudimentary stages of human culture. Here rational and scientific thought openly confess their breakdown; they surrender to their most dangerous enemy.

In order to find the explanation of this phenomenon that at first sight seems to derange all our thoughts and defy all our logical standards we must begin with the beginning. Nobody can hope to understand the origin, the character, and influence of our modern political myths without first answering a preliminary question. We must know what myth is before we can explain how it works. Its special effects can only be accounted for if we have attained a clear insight into its general nature.

What does myth mean? And what is its function in man’s cultural life? As soon as we raise this question we are plunged into a great battle between conflicting views. In this case the most disconcerting feature is not the lack but the abundance of our empirical material. The problem has been approached from every angle. Both the historical development of mythical thought and its psychological foundations have been carefully studied. Philosophers, ethnologists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists have their share in these studies. We seem now to be in possession of all the facts; we have a comparative mythology that extends over all the parts of the world and that leads us from the most elementary forms to highly developed and sophisticated conceptions. As regards our data the chain seems to be closed; no essential link is missing. But the theory of myth is still highly controversial. Every school gives us a different answer; and some of these answers are in flagrant contradiction of each other. A philosophical theory of myth must begin at this point.

Among reviewers of the book was the distinguished political philosopher Leo Strauss, who wrote:

However one may have to judge this view of myth, Cassirer is certainly right in negatively characterizing philosophy proper by its “struggle against myth.” In Greek philosophy, he holds, that struggle found its culminating expression in the doctrines of Socrates and Plato.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds about the book:

In the case of Cassirer, by contrast, although he is certainly a follower and champion of the Enlightenment, he is by no means a thinker of the Enlightenment itself. He is instead a creature of the twentieth century, confronted with forms of science, and also of socio-political organization, technology, warfare, and much else, which could not have been envisaged by either Kant or Hegel. Moreover, the unprecedented horrors of the first half of the twentieth century put Cassirer in a very different moral universe in which no religious or cultural tradition could simply be taken for granted. This is clear in Cassirer’s discussion of religion at the end of Mythical Thought, which, in contrast to both Kant and Hegel, ranks art rather than religion as the highest development of the expressive function of symbolic meaning. We must, in the end, acknowledge that Cassirer’s discussion of myth sheds a bright light on one of the most important problems of his time, namely, the rise of the technologically driven totalitarian state – a problem that continues increasingly to threaten us even today.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)