Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech politician, sociologist and philosopher, who as an eager advocate of Czechoslovak independence during World War I became the founder and first President of Czechoslovakia, and thus referred to as "President liberator".
Background
Masaryk was born to a poor working-class family in the predominantly Catholic city of Hodonín, Moravia (in the region of Moravian Slovakia, today in the Czech Republic). Another tradition claims the nearby Slovak village of Kopčany, the home of his father, as his birthplace. He subsequently grew up in the village of Čejkovice, in South Moravia, later moving to Brno to study.
His father Jozef Masárik, born in Kopčany in Slovakia (then the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary), was a carter and later the steward and coachman at the Imperial Estate of near-by Hodonín. Tomáš's mother Teresie Masaryková (née Kropáčková) was a Moravian of Slavic origin but with German education. She worked as a cook at the Estate where she met Jozef Masárik and they married on 15 August 1849.
Education
After grammar school in Brno and Vienna, from 1872–1876 Masaryk attended the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Franz Brentano. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in 1876, and completed his habilitation thesis at the same university in 1879. The thesis was entitled Der Selbstmord als sociale Massenerscheinung der modernen Civilisation ("Suicide as a Social Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization"). Between 1876 and 1879, he studied in Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt and Edmund Husserl.
Career
In 1882, when the University of Prague was divided into two sections, one German and the other Czech, Masaryk was appointed to a Czech professorship. He was extremely receptive to western trends in sociology and political science, and his journals, Athendum and Cas especially, worked to counteract Czech romanticism. Masaryk never developed a philosophical system of his own; rather, he sought to synthesize German idealism and West European positivism. He also wrote widely on Marxism (which he opposed) and Russian history, religion, and philosophy. Pan-Slav ideals did not appeal to him.
From 1891 to 1893 Masaryk served as deputy of the Young Czech (Liberal) party in the Austrian Reichsrat as well as in the Bohemian Landtag. He returned to active politics in 1907 as deputy for the moderately left Iiberalist Realist party, and bitterly opposed the Dual Monarchy's alliance with Germany and its annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Masaryk in 1880 had formally abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism, but soon embraced agnosticism.
At the outbreak of the war he at once came out for a western orientation as the solution to the question of Czech statehood. Specifically, Masaryk, in December 1914, fled Vienna and spent the next four years arguing for Czech independence in Switzerland, France, Britain, Italy, Russia, and the United States. He was ably assisted in his propagandistic efforts by Eduard Benes, secretary of the Czechoslovakian National Council of which Masaryk was president.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 gave Masaryk the opportunity to go to that country, and he successfully negotiated with Bolshevik leaders the formation of a Czech Legion, comprised of about 92,000 Czech deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army. In May 1918, Masaryk went to the United States, where he was to achieve his greatest publicity triumphs. On May 29, 1918, he persuaded Secretary of State Robert Lansing to issue a declaration of sympathy with the cause of Czech and Yugoslav independence; the Lansing declaration was approved by the Allied governments on June 3, 1918.
Moreover, on June 30 in the so-called Pittsburgh Declaration, Masaryk attained the acceptance of American-Slovak leaders to the notion of a joint Czecho-Slovakian state. A realist, Masaryk credited the American actions more than the official proclamations of statehood by the Czech National Council on October 28 and the Slovak Council one day later for the founding of the new state. On November 14, 1918, Masaryk was elected "president and liberator" at Prague, and in 1920, 1927, and 1934 was reelected president of the Czechoslovakian republic. He retired in 1935 at the age of eighty-five, leaving the government in the hands of his beloved pupil, Benes. Masaryk died in Castle Lana, near Prague, on September 14, 1937. Eleven years later his son Jan committed suicide rather than see his father's creation pass into Joseph Stalin's rule.
Masaryk produced a wide range of philosophical works, including early essays on Hume, a study ot the classification and interrelations of the sciences and a monumental history 0 Russian philosophy (1913). In epistemology he subscribed to realism and was inclined towards emp111' cism, though he also advanced a view of cogniti°n as a synthesis of sense perception, reason, feelings and will. Masaryk was a confirmed theist but rejected supernatural revelation as a source o knowledge.
Masaryk’s principal interest in philosophyalready evident in the 1881 study of suicide, was m its use as an instrument for the diagnosis an treatment of social ills. A believer in absolutes grounded in a religious perception the world, he elaborated the humanitarian idea ^ that he saw as the goals of historical progress, n identified those ideals with democracy an individualism and was a stern critic of Marxism.
Interests
Social and political philosophy. Philosophy of history. Russian philosophy.
Connections
On 15 March 1878, he married Charlotte Garrigue in Brooklyn, whom he'd met at Leipzig. They lived in Vienna until 1881, when they moved to Prague.