Stanley Hoffmann frequently disclaimed responsibility for his academic interests: Hitler was his unwelcome mentor. “It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics”, he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age”. Hoffmann was born in Vienna in November 1928. The next year, he and his mother left for France. He was an impressionable eleven year-old when the Germans invaded France and his “unquiet world collapsed”.
Stanley died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 13, 2015, in a different but still unquiet world. Stanley associated globalization with new forms of “chaos and violence”, where the safety of all can be held hostage by the humiliation and anger of the few. Its paradoxical effect, he argued, has been to make the world “the theater of multiple fragmentations, all dangerous, often explosive”. Fear, so much a part of his childhood, is again in the air.Contemporary men and women are in a situation comparable to the beast in the burrow, immortalized in Kafka’s short story. It hears ominous noises, knocks, and movements, and runs from one place in the burrow to another in order to find where the threat is located—an exhausting life of fear. We know, today, that the threat can be almost anything: the acts of another state, the protests or uprisings of a religious or ethnic or political minority, domestic or foreign terrorists, or the repressive moves of one’s own state.
This unquiet world—like the preceding world of the Cold War and the nuclear revolution, imperial contraction and nationalist self-assertion and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, and conflicts in the Middle East— was Stanley’s constant object of attention…