The Art of Survival

Before he was a financier or a philanthropist, George Soros was a fourteen-year-old on forged papers in occupied Budapest. This is the method his father taught him, and it never stopped running.

A course on the thought of George Soros.

Philosophy · Finance

What you will learn

  • Explain why prominence became a liability in the camp, and what Tivadar concluded from it.
  • Identify the premise his escape plan got wrong.
  • State the difference between a plan that fails and a plan that is defended.
  • Explain what decumulation converts wealth into, and in which states of the world it pays.
  • Identify the 1938 encounter that Tivadar names as the lesson.
  • State both readings of Tivadar's working life, and why the evidence does not settle between them.
  • Explain why the 1939 law's residence test made citizenship revocable rather than merely restricted.
  • Describe what a retroactive clause does that an ordinary restriction does not.

Course outline

  1. Siberia — Tivadar's founding story is not a story about being right. He organised an escape from a Siberian prison camp on a premise that was wrong in its most basic geographical fact, discovered it weeks in…
  2. The Decumulation — Between the wars, Tivadar systematically sold off what he owned. His son cannot decide whether this was the wisdom of a man who had learned what possessions cost, or the retreat of a man who had…
  3. What a Statute Can Undo — In 1939 the Hungarian parliament passed a law whose most consequential clause was not a quota. It made citizenship depend on where your family had been living twenty-five years earlier — and so made…
  4. The Papers — Ten months of forged identities, and a working theory of what a document is for. Hannah Arendt supplies the reason the paperwork mattered: rights are not carried in the person, and a family that had…
  5. The Happiest Year — George Soros calls the ten months of the occupation the happiest of his life, and knows how that sounds. The module sets out the shape of what he learned — and then closes on him at sixty-nine saying…

Works read in this course

  • Maskerado — Dancing Around Death in Nazi Hungary — Tivadar Soros's account of the ten months of German occupation, written in Esperanto in the 1960s and translated into English in 2000.
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt's 1951 study, whose ninth chapter is the classic analysis of what happens to a person who belongs to no state.
  • Soros — The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire — Michael T. Kaufman's 2002 biography, the source for the family's early history and for George's later reflections on his father.

Built from

This course was built from 3 books.

  • Michael T. Kaufman, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire
  • Tivadar Soros, Maskerado: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Hungary
  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Terms introduced

Maskerado, Arrow Cross, the yellow star, decumulation, the right to have rights, statelessness

Part of the Simposeum course library.