populism
Folk-Socialism, a Left Populist Disorder
Richard Löwenthal (1908-1991) was a German Jewish writer and political scientist. In the Weimar Republic he belonged to the Communist youth movement and then to a revolutionary splinter group called the Leninist Organisation, also known as New Beginning. He helped organise underground resistance to the Nazi regime before he was forced into exile. He published a series of critical essays on fascism and Stalinism, which he interpreted as twin totalitarian efforts to repress class struggle. Eventually arriving in London, he aided the British war effort and helped broker peace between German Social Democrats and leftwing splinter groups in exile. After the war, he worked as a correspondent for Reuters and the Observer, covering developments in world communism. Eventually he resettled in West Germany, where he was named professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin. One of his students there was the New Left leader Rudi Dutschke. By the 1960s, however, Löwenthal had evolved from revolutionary socialist into defender of the democratic establishment.
