...just finished reading this 1960 book by James Joll, which consists of essays on Leon Blum (literary critic turned Socialist prime minister of France in the 1936 Popular Front government), Walter Rathenau (businessman and philosopher turned foreign minister in Weimar Germany). and Filippo Marinetti (avant-garde polemicist turned promoter for Mussolini).
Some conclusions as to how well their backgrounds and skills as intellectuals served them, their parties, and their societies when they turned to politics:
1) Marinetti: At least partly because he did not change his anticlerical, "shock the bourgeoisie" Futurist line to accord with Mussolini's moves toward accommodation with the Vatican and the respectables of Italy, he became a minor figure in Fascist Italy rather than Mussolini's Goebbels. The eval: His intellectual background and skills translated fairly poorly into political success for himself and for Fascism (much as one may be grateful for that lack of success given the counterproductive ultranationalism and populism of Fascism).
2) Rathenau: His philosophical reflections on the distinction between a logic of means and a logic of ultimate value, combined with his formidable practical skills as a businessman, helped make him a distinctively gifted political figure who carried out high-level technical work as Minister of German Reconstruction and as Foreign Minister while facing with apparent serenity the possibility of being killed by ultranationalists, as he in fact was. But because he was affiliated only with a small liberal party and was resistant to party spirit, he was easily pigeonholed by foes as an avatar of elite Jewish cosmpolitanism in a way that would have been less plausible had he been affiliated with a conservative party (if one would have had him) or the Social Democrats with their working-class base. The eval: His intellectual background and skills translated quite well into (all-too-short-lived) political success for himself, but unfortunately not for a party or for Weimar.
3) Blum: His background as a literary critic and a cultural radical (author of a book advocating the idea that human beings go through a natural stage of sexual experimentation before settling down into monogamy) likely contributed to--much as it could have gone the other way--his becoming a Socialist Party leader who opposed Communism and had a strong feeling for bourgeois liberties and culture. Although his understanding of economics was far inferior to Rathenau's, his party spirit and the willingness of the French Socialists to be led by a Jewish intellectual allowed him to become a greatly more effective politician in France than Rathenau was in Germany. The eval: His intellectual background and skills translated well into success for himself and his party, and more broadly for social democracy as a movement of cultural liberalism as well as egalitarian, unionist economics; even if the qualities Blum brought to Socialism did not achieve much for France in the dire state of the 1930s, they did at least serve as a harbinger of qualities that contributed to the nation's postwar success.
