THE GERMAN COLLEGE OF POLITICS AND THE SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS (GERMANY, CHINA)

When Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei reformed Peking University in the 1910's, he took up an above-partisan approach to education and a matter-of-fact style to the study of politics. He was looking for a new kind of internationalism and an integrated view of the world for China.;It had contributed much to the advancement of the discipline of political science by systematically studying different aspects of politics. Intellectually, it had inherited several important traditions from the Wilhelmian era and placed them in new perspectives. The Weberian tradition of looking at politics objectively was incorporated as the underlying principle of the College. The advocacy of above-partisanship and the attitude of matter-of-factness in the analysis of political issues aimed at integrating the objective understanding of political reality with the cultivation of creative and dynamic individual will. This comprehensive and objective view of politics would guide the individual to search for a holistic conception of life, with which he might become a truly "whole" person no longer atomized by modern technology. This search for wholeness, progressive and pro-modern, could find conterparts in the work of the German Work Union, the New Objectivity movement and the Bauhaus.;The founding of the German College of Politics in Berlin in 1920 reflected a parallel attempt. The College sought to rebuild the political tradition of Germany by promoting mass political education. It maintained a broad and flexible program of studies. Its faculty members and students came from a wide spectrum of ideological positions. It had established wide connections with American and German pacificist organizations.