Established in January 2026, this research group focuses on the history of liberalism and liberal thought in exile, in particular in the British and Anglophone context more generally.
London became a meeting point for numerous exiled German-speaking intellectuals, many of them with Jewish backgrounds, who sought to rethink the foundations of liberal democracy. Among them were figures who would later become distinguished scholars and writers: sociologists like Karl Mannheim and Viola Klein, economists including Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi, and writers and intellectuals such as Elias and Veza Canetti, H.G. Adler, and Franz Baermann Steiner.
That the British experience proved decisive for these intellectuals can be illustrated by a telling remark. In the preface to Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction Mannheim characteristically observes that the ‘whole approach’ of his new studies derives from the fact that he had recently ‘been living in a country where liberal democracy functions almost undisturbed’. This gave him the opportunity to study the effects of its principles at close quarters.
The experience of exile therefore often went hand in hand with a productive shift in perspective on the fate of liberal society as a whole – a question at the centre of the group’s discussions. Many of these thinkers hoped, in the violent ‘Age of Extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm), to arrive at a new balance between freedom and solidarity. Against the backdrop of English liberalism and the experience of Fascism on the Continent, they produced a remarkably wide range of political, sociological, literary, and especially essayistic writing. The intellectual openness of exile enabled them to reflect critically on their own historical moment – with a resonance that extends well into the present.
The group meets online on the last Thursday of each month. Two in-person workshops in Cologne and London are planned for 2026 and 2027. The Cologne workshop will be organised in association with the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies.
For further information, including concept and reading list, please contact:
Till Greite (till.greite@sas.ac.uk) or
Till Breyer (till.breyer@uni-koeln.de)
Further information about the Academic Working Groups at the Leo Baeck Institute, Berlin
About our current collaborative work with the Erich Auerbach Institute, Cologne
This project is sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Leo Baeck Institute, Germany
