[1] Vienna was the capital of the vast multicultural and multiethnic Austrian empire that covered much of Eastern Europe, and Borkenau grew up in a cosmopolitan city that was full of various peoples.

From 1925 to 1929, Borkenau worked as a research assistant for Jürgen Kuczynski at the Forschungsstelle für internationale Politik in Berlin, a think-tank that was sponsored by the German Communist Party.

[3] A major interest for Borkenau was in discovering the reasons why the November Revolution had failed to develop along Marxist lines, which led him to become involved in the Frankfurt School.

[3] At the end of 1929, Borkenau was expelled from both the Comintern and the KPD, owing to his personal repulsion and disgust about how the Communists operated, combined with an increasing horror about Stalinism.

[2] In 1930, he began work on his Habilitationsschrift, a book entitled Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (The Transition from the Feudal to Bourgeois Interpretation of the World).

[3] Focusing on 17th-century Europe, Borkenau argued against the claims of Wilhelm Dilthey who maintained that the emergence of modern Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities) as university subjects was a process of transcending feudal ways of viewing the world.

[6] During the 1930s, Borkenau was involved with organizing aid from abroad for the clandestine group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings), which was working for the end of the Nazi regime.

[9] However, as the "new economic elite" continually revitalized itself by ever more destructive competition, more and more ordinary people felt the effects, thus causing the state to intervene.

[9] In Borkenau's opinion, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany and Communism in Russia, all in different ways, represented the unfolding of the process.

[9] Borkenau argued that Vladimir Lenin created the first totalitarian dictatorship with all power concentrated into the hands of the state, which was completely unconstrained by any class forces as all previous regimes had been.

[7] In August–September 1936, Borkenau made a two-month visit to Spain, where he observed the effects of Spanish Civil War in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

[18] In particular, Borkenau made an issue of the Soviet treatment of Manfred Stern who under the alias of General Emilio Kléber had emerged as the most able of the officers leading the International Brigades fighting for the republic.

[18] Stern was posing as a Canadian, but in fact had been born in the Austrian province of Bukovina (modern western Moldova and northeastern Romania).

In Spain, where the properly revolutionary processes have been so quickly superseded by something entirely different, it has made great strides since the beginning of the civil war....

[21] After the Anschluss, the Nazi regime refused to make Borkenau a German citizen, thus rendering him stateless, a legal status he retained for the rest of his life.

[22] Borkenau wrote: "It is doubtful whatever the clergy, who had defended the War to the end, would have easily kept the alliance of the peasants after it, had there not existed the socialist bogy".

[26] Borkenau began his book with the question: The problem, and a very important one at that, is whatever Germany is simply carrying out well-thought plans or is driven into limitless adventures by developments over which she herself is not the master.

Borkenau argued against the popular idea in Britain that the Nazi regime would eventually settle down into a type of "normalcy" as a profound misreading of the Third Reich.

[28] Borkenau wrote that "the complete disintegration of the old economic structures and the old spiritual values in Germany" made the National Socialist regime sui generis.

But a prophet aiming to prove himself a Messiah and to bring immediate salvation to this world must make his earthly career a constant sequence of miraculous successes.

[29] Borkenau's portrayal of Nazi foreign policy as driven by powerful internal forces into a limitless expansionism prefigured the arguments made by functionalist historians like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, who similarly contended that Nazi foreign policy did not have any plans but was rather "expansionism without objective" pushed by internal forces.

[32] For Britain, Borkenau urged a gradualist transition from capitalism to socialism, writing that "precisely through the gradual growth of state intervention" as preached by the Labour Party was the best way forward.

[32] Borkenau condemned Communism, writing: "How dare I soil the name of socialism by associating it with a dirty piece of trickery such as Soviet Russia?

In June 1950, Borkenau attended the conference in Berlin together with other anti-Communist intellectuals such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook and Melvin J. Lasky that resulted in the initiation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

[35] The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a July 1950 letter to his friend, the American art dealer Bernard Berenson, wrote: "I haven't been abroad except for four days in Berlin for a so-called Kongress für Kulturelle Freheit where I misbehaved.... Aided by my English colleague A. J. Ayer, I led a resistance movement against the organisers of the Congress, which in fact was a totally illiberal organisation dominated by professional ex-Communist boulevardiers like Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau, confident in the support of the German ex-Nazis in the audience".

In 1949, Borkenau, in a newspaper article, criticized Deutscher for endorsing in his biography of Joseph Stalin the official Soviet version that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky together with the rest of the Red Army high command had been plotting a coup in collaboration with the intelligence services of Germany and Japan, thus justifying Stalin's "liquidation" of the Red Army leadership in 1937.

[43] In an article in the April 1954 edition of Commentary entitled "Getting at the Facts Behind the Soviet Facade", Borkenau wrote that the Sino-Soviet alliance was unstable and would last for only a decade or so.

[46] In 1954, Borkenau wrote that he made that prediction on the basis of a resolution of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany on the "lessons of the Slansky case".

[15] Another topic of interest for Borkenau was engaging in an intellectual critique of Toynbee and Oswald Spengler's work about when and why civilizations weaken and end.

[47] Borkenau noted that the result of Roland's vainglorious desire is his own death and the destruction of his own army, which was very different from how medieval German poets would have handled the story.