The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual And Social History, 1848-1938

Part One of this book shows how bureaucracy sustained the Habsburg Empire while inciting economists, legal theorists, and socialists to urge reform. Part Two examines how Vienna's coffeehouses, theaters, and concert halls stimulated creativity together with complacency. Part Three explores the fin-de-siècle worldview known as Viennese Impressionism. Interacting with positivistic science, this reverence for the ephemeral inspired pioneers like Mach, Wittgenstein, Buber, and Freud. Part Four describes the vision of an ordered cosmos among Germans in Bohemia. Their philosophers cultivated a Leibnizian faith whose collapse haunted Kafka and Mahler. Part Five explains how in Hungary, wishful thinking reinforced political activism, with figures like Lukacs and Mannheim systematizing the sociology of knowledge, and Herzel and Nordau initiating political Zionism. Part Six investigates attributes permeating Austrian thought, such as hostility to technology and delight in polar opposites.