The Role of Exiles in the History of Knowledge: Two Cases

Abstract

This chapter attempts to assess the distinctive role of exiles and expatriates in the history of knowledge with the aid of two case studies. The first of these analyses the work of the French Protestant scholars who were expelled from France by King Louis XIV in 1685 and found a home in London, Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere. The second case study is concerned with the academics, mainly Jewish and mainly German-speaking, who were forced to leave Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1930s, settling in Britain, the US, Turkey and other countries. On the basis of these case studies, and others made by the author and published elsewhere, it is argued that exiles and expatriates performed three distinctive intellectual roles. The first is mediation between the culture of their homeland and that of their host country or “hostland”. The second is distanciation or detachment, a viewpoint that has often led to new contributions to knowledge. In the third place, their encounters with scholars in the hostland have sometimes led to a kind of hybridization: for instance, the semi-anglicization of the refugees who came to England in the 1930s, and the semi-germanization of their English students. This chapter is thus concerned with “transgressing difference” in the political-geographical sense of that phrase and with the movement of knowledge across frontiers.