Arno J. Mayer

Mayer's book, Plowshares into Swords (2008) is an anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian account of Israeli history, tracing what Mayer regards as the degradation of Jewry in general and Zionism in particular with respect to what Mayer considers as Israeli colonial aggression against the Palestinians. In a largely favorable review, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft termed Plowshares into Swords an enlightening account of Israeli history that traces such people as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and, perhaps unexpectedly, Vladimir Jabotinsky and critiques the "chauvinistic and brutalising tendencies of Zionism". In a negative review of the book, British scholar Simon Goldhill said it was of little value as history and criticized Mayer for his political bias, arguing that Mayer ignored Arab acts and media rhetoric against Jewish settlers and Israelis, falsely portrayed the Six-Day War in 1967 as a "calculated imperialist plot", claimed that all Western criticism of the Islamic world for human rights issues is nothing more than self-interested, and described Arab feeling toward Jews buying property in Palestine in the 1920s as "righteous anger".

Mayer has been very critical of the policies of the United States government. When interviewed for a 2003 documentary, he described the Roman Empire as a "tea party" in comparison to its American counterpart.

In his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, Mayer argues that Adolf Hitler ordered the Final Solution in December 1941 in response to the realisation that the Wehrmacht could not capture Moscow, hence ensuring Nazi Germany's defeat by the Soviet Union. In Mayer's opinion, the Judeocide (Mayer's preferred term for the Holocaust) was the horrific climax of the "Thirty Years' Crisis" that had been raging in Europe since 1914. The book considers the Holocaust as primarily an expression of anti-communism:

In his 1981 book, The Persistence of the Old Regime, Mayer argued that there was an "umbilical cord" linking all events of European history from 1914 to 1945. In Mayer's opinion, World War I was proof that "[t]hough losing ground to the forces of industrial capitalism, the forces of the old order were still sufficiently willful and powerful to resist and slow down the course of history, if necessary by recourse to violence." Mayer argued that because of its ownership of the majority of the land in Europe and the middle class were divided and undeveloped politically, the nobility continued as the dominant class in Europe. Mayer argued that challenged by a world in which it was losing their function, the aristocracy promoted reactionary beliefs such as those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Social Darwinism, together with a belief in dictatorship and fascist dictatorship in particular. In Mayer's opinion, "It would take two world wars and the Holocaust […] finally to dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe's civil and political societies."

In a 1967 essay "The Primacy of Domestic Politics", Mayer made a Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument for the origins of World War I. Mayer rejected the traditional Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") argument of traditional diplomatic history on the grounds that it failed to take into account that in Mayer's opinion, all of the major European countries were in a "revolutionary situation" during 1914, and thus ignores what Mayer considers to be the crucial effect that domestic politics had on foreign-policy making elites. In Mayer's opinion, during 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was on the verge of civil war and massive industrial unrest, Italy had been experienced the Red Week of June 1914, the French Left and Right were almost warring with each other, Germany suffered from ever-increasing political strife, Russia was close to suffering a huge strike, and Austria-Hungary was confronted with increasing ethnic and class tensions. Mayer insists that liberalism and centrist ideologies in general were disintegrating due to the challenge from the extreme right in the UK, France and Italy while being a non-existent force in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Mayer ended his essay by arguing that World War I should be best understood as a pre-emptive "counterrevolutionary" strike by ruling elites in Europe to preserve their power by distracting public attention to foreign affairs.

Mayer argued in his Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967), which won the American Historical Association's 1968 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, that the Paris Peace Conference was a struggle between what he termed the "Old Diplomacy" of the alliance system, secret treaties and brutal power politics and the "New Diplomacy" as represented by Vladimir Lenin's Decree on Peace of 1917 and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which Mayer considers as promoting peaceful and rational diplomacy. He described the world of 1919 as divided between the "forces of movement", representing liberal and left-wing forces, representing the "New Diplomacy" and the "forces of order", representing conservative and reactionary forces, representing the "Old Diplomacy". Mayer considers all foreign policy as basically a projection of domestic politics, and much of his writing on international relations is devoted towards explaining just what domestic lobby was exerting the most influence on foreign policy at that particular time. In Mayer's opinion, the "New Diplomacy", associated with Lenin and Wilson, was associated also with Russia and America, both societies that Mayer has argued either had destroyed or lacked the partial "modernized" societies that characterized the rest of Europe. He sees the United States' diplomacy at Versailles as an attempt to establish a "new", but "counter-revolutionary" style of diplomacy against "revolutionary" Soviet diplomacy.

Mayer's opinion is that the greatest failure of the Treaty of Versailles was that it was a triumph for the "Old Diplomacy" with only minor elements of "New Diplomacy". According to Mayer, the irrational fears generated by the Russian Revolution resulted in an international system designed to contain the Soviet Union. A major influence on Mayer was the British historian E. H. Carr, who was his friend and mentor. In 1961, Mayer played a major role in the American publication of Carr's book What Is History? Many of Mayer's writings concerning international affairs during the interwar era use the assumptions of Carr's 1939 book The Twenty Year's Crisis.

Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and enlisted in the United States Army. During his time in the Army, he was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland and is recognized as one of the Ritchie Boys. He served as an intelligence officer and eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. He was discharged in 1946. He received his education at the City College of New York, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and Yale University. He has been professor at Wesleyan University (1952–53), Brandeis University (1954–58) and Harvard University (1958–61). He has taught at Princeton University since 1961.

Arno Joseph Mayer (born June 19, 1926), is an American historian who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

Mayer was born into a middle-class family in Luxembourg on 19 June 1926. His father was a wholesaler who had studied at the University of Heidelberg and had strong social democratic and Zionist beliefs. Mayer described his family as "fully emancipated and largely acculturated Luxembourgian Jews". The family fled into France amid the German invasion on 10 May 1940 and reached the France–Spain border by Autumn 1940 but were turned back by Spanish border guards and were in the Vichy-controlled "Free Zone" after the Fall of France. The family succeeded in boarding a ship to Oran in French Algeria on 18 October 1940 but were prevented from entering Morocco because they lacked a visa and were house arrested for several weeks in Oudja. They secured visas for the United States on 22 November 1940 and arrived in New York during January 1941. His maternal grandparents who had refused to leave Luxembourg were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto where his grandfather died in December 1943.

A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theory and what he terms "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. Mayer posits that Europe was characterized during the 19th century by a rapid economic modernization by industrialization and retardation of political change. He has argued that what he refers to as "The Thirty Years' Crisis" was caused by the problems of a dynamic new society produced by industrialization coexisting with a rigid political order. He feels that the aristocracy of all of the European countries had too much power, and it was their efforts to keep power that resulted in World War I, the development of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust.