"Religious affiliation: Dissident.” Josef Doppler, a political scholar on the margins of academia?

The paper aims to offer insights into the relationship of a political scholar towards established academia, based on the variegated life of Josef Doppler, a Bratislava-born left-wing intellectual. At first, in a short theoretical introduction, the notion of the political scholar, coined by Franz Neumann, and its difficult relationship towards academia is elucidated. Then, a short sketch of Doppler’s life covers its most important stages: his communist activities in Prague, Frankfurt, where he was in contact with Max Horkheimer, his second stay in the Czechoslovak Republic, finally his exile in Britain and his military service. Subsequently, the paper examines how and to what extent the notion of the political scholar is relevant for each of Doppler’s different concrete situations, and discusses the strategies how Doppler tried to cope with the problems connected to them.