Arno Mayer

Arno J. Mayer
Mayer at a 2013 IEIS Conference
Born	(1926-06-19) June 19, 1926 (age 90) Luxembourg
Residence	United States
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Diplomatic history European history Modernization theory
Institutions	Princeton University Harvard University Brandeis University Wesleyan University
Alma mater	Yale University Graduate Institute of International Studies City College of New York
Notable students	Corey Robin
Influences	Karl Marx
Influenced	Gabriel Kolko

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

Mayer was born in 1926 into a Jewish family that fled to the United States during the Nazi invasion of Luxembourg in May 1940. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1944; that same year he was drafted into the United States Army and served as an intelligence officer. He eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. 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.

A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theory and what he calls "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. Mayer posits that Europe was characterized in the 19th century by a rapid modernization in the economic field by industrialization and retardation in the political field. 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 facing a rigid political order. He feels that the in all of the European countries held far too much power, and it was their efforts to keep power that led to World War I, the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust.