Arnold Brecht, Professor Emeritus of Political Science on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, died after a brief illness on September 11, 1977. Death came to him while he was vacationing in West Germany, the country of his birth. He spent indeed his very last days in a region close to his beloved native Lubeck. What seems to be a mere accident is not without deeper significance. The return of the native in the shadow of approaching death symbolizes the closing of the circle that circumscribes Brecht's long and harmonious life.

Brecht was a highly distinguished political scientist in more than one respect. Not the least of them was that he had been engaged in the practice of politics before, in 1933, the science of politics became his primary occupation. Aristotle himself could not have questioned that Brecht, unlike the sophists, was as a teacher of politics richly equipped with political experience. He acquired it in his career in the German civil service. As a politischer Beamter close to the centers of decision-making bearing on important matters of national and international politics, he not only became an adept in bureaucratic techniques but also learned to know and appreciate the complexity of political problems. In the tumultuous years which presaged the downfall of the Weimar Republic, Brecht, without being affiliated with any political party, fought in the first ranks of German democracy for the preservation of freedom in his homeland. The role he played in those stormy years testifies to his personal courage as well as to his deep devotion to the ideal of constitutional democracy. His representation in 1932 of the Prussian government, deposed by Chancellor von Papen, before the Supreme Constitutional Court at Leipzig and his encounter, on February 2, 1933, with Hitler, three days after his appointment as Chancellor, when Brecht at a meeting of the Reichsrat lectured the Fuhrer on his constitutional duties, were the most dramatic and are therefore the best known episodes in his political life. They by no means exhaust, however, the wide range of his activities and their impact on the administrative and constitutional history of the Weimar Republic.

When in 1933 Brecht arrived in this country as a political refugee, he easily changed from a public servant into an academic teacher. As Hans Simons, his life-long friend and colleague, observed, "the scholarly approach" had already characterized the work of Brecht as an administrator. His scientific publications go back practically to his student days at the beginning of our century; they all dealt with problems of civil law. Encouraged by the acclaim they received, Brecht in 1914 contemplated entering upon an academic career. Only the outbreak of World War I prevented him from carrying out his intention; it also prompted him to turn to what was to become his main field: public law. The body of his writings pertaining thereto grew ever larger during his German period. The lectures he gave for five years at the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik in Berlin were another step in the direction of academic pursuits. The break in Brecht's professional life was thus actually less deep than it might appear.

It is not surprising that at the beginning of his American period and practically throughout the twenty years of his active membership in the Graduate Faculty, problems with which Brecht had been dealing in his bureaucratic past loomed large in his publications. Those were, moreover, the years in which concentration on questions of postwar reconstruction was held to be a moral obligation of social scientists. Brecht was not the man who would have shrunk from meeting it. The practical experience acquired in the past naturally proved most fruitful in the books and articles Brecht devoted to the specific problems of German constitutional reconstruction. But it also shines through in his writings on issues of postwar international organization. His realistic insight into the intricacies of political questions and actions protected him from being swept off his feet by the utopian waves of the war years. Instead of indulging in grandiose designs of world government, he focused his attention on the problems of regional organization and pleaded for a European federation of a type which anticipated the European communities of today.

If Brecht's academic career is unusual in that he turned to pure scholarly pursuits only at the age of fifty, it is even more remarkable that his retirement in 1954 from active service in the Graduate Faculty was the beginning of another--in fact, the most productive--period in his life as a scholar. If Cato the Elder was right, the alleged vexations of old age people like to complain about are not really the faults of old age itself. "The blame," he asserted, "rests with character, not with age." The wise man will know to turn the limitations of age into blessings. Arnold Brecht did indeed know it.

Five years after his retirement he published a voluminous treatise on Political Theory, the opus magnum of his scholarly writings. The book is essentially a methodological treatise, its main concern being the foundations and boundary lines of political theory, understood in the narrow sense to which the term has been reduced in modern times. Brecht accepts the notion that political theory can be considered as scientific only insofar as it follows the canons of empirical science, and its implication that the political scientist, qua scientist, is bound by an obligation to abstain from judgment on questions relating to ultimate moral values. At the same time, Brecht was keenly aware of the tragic irony that current political theory is prevented by its very assumptions from giving moral guidance in the most momentous political issues of our disjointed times. Concern about this scientific void is clearly one of the motives that inspired Brecht in writing his book. He is therefore anxious to cleanse scientific value relativism of elements which have become closely associated with it but, he thinks, are actually alien to it. One need not accept Brecht's basic conception and yet cannot but recognize the treatise--to use the words of one of its critics--as "a scholarly achievement of the first importance." For never before had this fateful trend in modern political science and its culmination in the twentieth century been discussed so lucidly and in such detail as in this work.

The Political Theory was followed in the later sixties by the publication in Germany of two autobiographical volumes; in 1970 an abridged English version appeared in this country. These essentially political memoirs were immediately praised as a most valuable source for the study and understanding of recent German political history.