Hans Eysenck - Alleged Relationships With Far Right Groups

Alleged Relationships With Far Right Groups

On the basis of some of his publications about psychoanalysis and intelligence, Eysenck was accused of being a supporter of the extreme right. Connecting arguments were that Eysenck had articles published in the German newspaper National Zeitung, which called him contributor, and in Nation und Europa, and that he wrote the preface to the book Das unvergängliche Erbe by Pierre Krebs, a far-right French writer, which was published by Krebs' Thule Seminar. The preface to Krebs' book was interpreted by linguist Siegfried Jäger as having "railed against the equality of people, presenting it as an 'untenable ideological doctrine'". In the National Zeitung he reproached Sigmund Freud for alleged trickiness and lack of frankness by reference to Freud's Jewish background. Other incidents that fueled Eysenck's critics like Michael Billig and Steven Rose include the appearance of Eysenck's books on UK National Front's list of recommended readings and an interview with Eysenck published by National Front's Beacon (1977) and later republished in the US neo-fascist Steppingstones; a similar interview had been published a year before by Neue Anthropologie, described by Eysenck's biographer Roderick Buchanan as a "sister publication to Mankind Quarterly, having similar contributors and sometimes sharing the same articles." Eysenck also wrote an introduction for Roger Pearson's Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe; Pearson was himself accused of having published numerous racist works and of connections to the old and new right. In this introduction to Pearson's book, Eysenck retorts that his critics are "the scattered troops" of the New Left, who have adopted the "psychology of the fascists". Eysenck book The Inequality of Man, translated in French as L'Inegalite de l'homme, was published by GRECE's publishing house, Éditions Corpernic. In 1974 Eysenck became a member of the academic advisory council of the Mankind Quarterly, joining those associated with the journal in attempting to reinvent it as a more mainstream academic vehicle. Billig asserts that in the same year Eysenck also became a member of the comité de patronage of GRECE's Nouvelle École.

Remarking on Eysenck's alleged right-wing connections, Buchanan writes: "For those looking to thoroughly demonize Eysenck, his links with far right groups revealed his true political sympathies." According to Buchanan, these harsh critics interpreted Eysenck's writings as "overtly racist". Furthermore, Buchanan writes that Eysenck's fiercest critics were convinced that Eysenck was "willfully misrepresenting a dark political agenda". Buchanan footnotes this observation with a quote from William Tucker who described Eysenck as "Jensen's dark doppelganger". Buchanan however disagrees with this stark interpretation: "Yet the tip-of-the-iceberg metaphor implicit in this accusation appears to be seriously misleading in Eysenck's case. More than most, what you saw was what you got. He spread himself too thin to be harbouring much beneath the surface." Buchanan goes on to argue that Eysenck's research was thinly spread across numerous domains to conclude that "There appeared to be no hidden agenda to Hans Eysenck. He was too self-absorbed, too preoccupied with his own aspirations as a great scientist to harbor specific political aims."

Buchanan then addresses Eysenck's handling of his public image in this matter: "Harder to brush off was the impression that Eysenck was insensitive, even willfully blind to the way his work played out in a wider political context. He did not want to believe, almost to the point of utter refusal, that his work gave succor to right-wing racialist groups. But there is little doubt that Jensen and Eysenck helped revive the confidence of these groups. It was unexpected vindication from a respectable scientific quarter. The cautionary language of Eysenck's interpretation of the evidence made little difference. To the racialist right, a genetic basis for groups differences in intelligence bore out racialist claims of inherent, immutable hierarchy." Buchanan exemplifies Eysenck's cautionary approach with a number of concrete examples from Eysenck's writings, and concludes that "If the appropriation of his work by right-wing groups brought him baggage that would be hard to shake off, how then did he construe his relationship with them? Curiously enough, he saw himself as a kind of enlightened scientific shepherd, guiding the blinkered and ignorant toward more sensible positions. Good research would eventually help temper all social wrongs and excesses. The trouble for Eysenck was that empirical science was clearly taken to be part of the problem as well as the solution. Its very impartiality was itself held up to question. The lack of consensus on the technical issues fed open-ended arguments about truth, social justice, and how we should live. Thus the controversy ran on and on."

Eysenck's defense was that ultimately he did not shy away from publishing or being interviewed in controversial publications, and that he did not necessarily share their editorial viewpoint. Buchanan suggests that this may have been true in general, with an Eysenck interview appearing in Mayfair and several articles by Eysenck being published in Penthouse. In his autobiography, Eysenck answered his critics with: "It is odd, and indeed paradoxical, that my most determined opponents should have been people with whose aims I completely agreed." Regarding the equality of people, Eysenck wrote: “The major argument in modern times is between those who define equality in terms of social status, and those who define it in terms of equality of biological inheritance. Equality of social status has always been a socialist idea, and it is certainly possible to argue about its desirability, or the possibility of achieving it. Equality of biological abilities and traits is a chimera which no thinking person should entertain for one moment.” Eysenck stated his own views in the Introduction to Race, Education and Intelligence: " the reader is consequently entitled to ask in which direction the writer's own political and social beliefs and attitudes go. My recognition of the importance of the racial problem, and my own attitudes of opposition to any kind of racial segregation, and hatred for those who suppress any sector of the community on grounds of race (or sex or religion) were determined in part by the fact that I grew up in Germany, at a time when Hitlerism was becoming the very widely held doctrine which finally prevailed and led to the deaths of several million Jews whose only crime was that they belonged to an imaginary 'race' which had been dreamed up by a group of men in whom insanity was mixed in equal parts with craftiness, paranoia with guile, and villainy with sadism. "