Lwów and the Dark Side of Thought Collectives

Fleck developed his theory of thought collectives in Lwów before the Second World War, and survived the systematic destruction of his city and community during it. The Lwów ghetto was established in November 1941. More than one hundred thousand Jews were concentrated there; most were murdered at the Bełżec extermination camp or killed during liquidations in the Janowska concentration camp. Fleck and his family were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and then to Buchenwald, where his scientific expertise in typhus vaccine production was exploited by his captors. He survived. His wife survived. His brother and many colleagues did not. The experience gave Fleck an intimacy with the dark capacities of thought collectives that no purely academic philosopher could match — and it shaped the mature form of his framework in ways that are easy to miss when reading the 1935 book in isolation.