“Menger 's first English translator lamented, "Menger's style is unusually
cumbersome, even for German. His constructions form complicated patterns of
clauses within clauses; they are filled with pronominal referents to these
clauses; and they abound in agglomerations of adverbial fillers. Many of his
sentences run half a page or more and expound several independent thoughts."
[...] From 1871 to 1873, he worked for the Habsburg foreign ministry, and he
continued to write for Die Wiener Zeitung. He became an adviser to the
minister-president Prince von Auersperg. He only resigned from this position
in 1873 when he became a professor at the University of Vienna. His lectures
usually attracted one or two dozen students, yet only four joined him in his
first private seminar. While that seminar grew to sixteen in 1877, Menger's
energies were divided between academic intrigues against the economist Lorenz
von Stein (with the help of his brother Anton and the Exners) and a two-year
engagement as the tutor of the Habsburg heir apparent, Rudolf.” 38


“Dense social and familial connections defined Habsburg cultural life.
Everyone within the Bildungsbürgertum seemed to know everyone else. [...] The
Mengers became a minidynasty; Friedrich Hayek descended from another. The
Exner family was probably the most famous. It produced ten professors across
three generations in areas as disparate as physics, meteorology, neurology,
biology, and law. The paterfamilias, Franz Exner, inspired the liberal 1848
reforms of the University of Vienna from his position in the first
postrevolutionary government. The Exners counted Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann,
and Sigmund Freud as close friends. At their Viennese home and their summer
retreat in the picturesque Salzkammergut, the Exners cultivated a remarkable
community built on the virtues of skepticism, well-roundedness, and self-
fashioning. [...] The Wittgensteins often played with their cousins the
Jurascheks, including Felicitas, Friedrich Hayek's mother. Hayek himself was
the scion of an academic family. His grandfathers were economists; Franz von
Juraschek was a close friend of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, one of Menger's most
illustrious students.” 34


“Carl Menger, too, had a favorite—he and his brothers, Max and Anton, held
court at Ronacher.” 33


“Carl followed his older brother, Max, to the University of Vienna, where he
studied law. His younger brother, Anton, matriculated a year later, but Carl
transferred to Charles University in Prague. There he ran afoul of a
conservative professor, flirted with German nationalism, and acquired the
quintessential mark of a nineteenth-century German university student, a
dueling scar. [...] He founded his own newspaper, the Wiener Tagblatt, in
November 1865; it reached a circulation of thirty-five thousand by February
1866. Part of its popularity owed to its low cost and populist message. [...]
Seeing its success, the liberal imperial government co-opted the paper, taking
over its financing and distribution. Government authorities then convinced
Menger to edit the regime's official organ, Die Wiener Zeitung. He worked as a
full-time journalist until the end of 1866, when he abruptly resigned. He
rented an apartment with his brother Anton and threw himself into theoretical
economic work for the first time.” 31


“The rise of an Austrian school of economics owed to the surrounding cultural
and political conditions of late imperial Austria more than it did to the
ingenuity of Menger.” 30


“The book, published by a small Viennese press, quickly went out of print. For
the rest of his life, Menger refused to allow the book to be reprinted or
translated. Consequently, it was nearly impossible to get one's hands on it
for over fifty years. His long-planned overhaul, which he worked on until the
end of his life, never appeared. At the end of his life, even Menger
questioned the book's lasting significance. Menger's Principles was
conceptually difficult and ponderously written, and it failed to attract many
allies. Menger retreated from academic work, publishing little and taking on
few students. By the late 1880s, however, European scholars spoke of an
"Austrian School."” 29f


“Principles was poorly distributed, found a limited readership, received
middling reviews, and played a minor role in the vibrant economic discussions
of the 1870s.” 29


“These sophisticated ideas have carried a seductive power—especially in
simplified and attenuated forms—and they have proven hard to dislodge, even
when linked to authoritarian governments, reactionary political movements, or
vapid thought leaders.” 28


“we may live in an Austrian era but not because of any one individual or idea.
The Austrians created a style of thought that offered a new and appealing
defense of free-market economics and political liberalism that enlivened
intellectual and political developments around the globe.” 27


“The last "Austrian Austrians" took part in preserving their tradition, trying
to save their nonsectarian "family" from radical libertarians who "have
inherited Mises's dogmatism without his genius, and are continuously quoting
Hayek without ... understanding a word of what he actually means."” 26


“Through GATT, the Bellagio Group, the RAND Corporation, and others, Haberler,
Machlup, and Morgenstern proved adept at behind-the-scenes policy
interventions that shaped economic liberalization and Cold War reasoning in
the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1980s "Washington Consensus,"
which coalesced in the halls of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank,
and US Treasury, was articulated by a Machlup student, John Williamson.” 26


“In the MPS, the Alpbach Forum, and the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies,
the Austrians sought allies in the fight for Western liberalism and Austrian
social science. They strove to restore European civilization—exemplified by
Habsburg cultural and scientific traditions. The Austrians moved beyond
intellectual work and into movement building. They courted journalists,
(European) liberal politicians, and antistate, pro-business financial backers.
Through these endeavors, the Austrians were pivotal to the reconstruction of
US conservatism, European liberalism, and transnational neoliberalism.” 25


“Over a dozen school members traveled to the English-speaking world during the
1920s and 1930s. They brought new theoretical ideas with them to the United
States and carried back cutting-edge empirical approaches. Their connections
to business elites in the International Chamber of Commerce and the
Rockefeller Foundation helped them attract global allies. They also took on
roles as public intellectuals, writing for popular audiences and creating
institutions to disseminate their work. They extended their influence into
policy and business affairs, playing roles in the Ministry of Finance, the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and the Austrian National Bank. Yet the Austrians
were more than economists: they conducted freewheeling salons, wrote drinking
songs, debated Goethe and Shakespeare, and took ski trips and Alpine summer
vacations together.” 24


“The Austrian School was from its inception at the same time a "most
successful scientific school" and a "highly influential 'old boy' network."”
22


“most members of the original school expressed ambivalence about the 1970s
Austrian "revival" and probably would recoil at what Austrianism has become.”
22


“Hayek himself argued that the Austrian School ceased to exist in the
wilderness of emigration. Moreover, the émigré Austrians were better known for
their social theory and political philosophy than their economics.” 18


“The tradition has endured for 125 years and survived transatlantic processes
of emigration, assimilation, and translation. It has seen at least six—perhaps
as many as seven or eight—generations of scholars bear the Austrian mantle.”
17


“Paul Ryan, admitted to distributing Road to Serfdom to staffers.” 13


“Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom. The "Definitive Edition" had appeared in
2007, yet it sold only six hundred copies a month for a year and a half. Then
the combined effects of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama
quadrupled its sales. The book sold seven thousand copies in 2008, twenty-
seven thousand in 2009. Talk of stimulus packages and "socialized medicine"
and the rise of the Tea Party movement spurred further sales. These factors
alone did not account for the one hundred thousand copies sold in June 2010,
however. The person who made Hayek a household name was the conservative media
personality Glenn Beck, who devoted an hour-long Fox News episode to Road.
[...] Joined by two scholars affiliated with the libertarian think tank the
Ludwig von Mises Institute, Thomas Woods and Yuri Maltsev, Beck implored his
millions-strong audience to take the first step in the struggle and read the
anticollectivist playbook: "Why don't we teach this everywhere? Find out for
yourself. Go online now and order it."” 12


Janek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (Yale University Press, 2019).


“it would be fatuous to equate the youth revolution of the late 1960's with
the Gay Apocalypse. Young people today lack the rigor, sense of continuity,
and savoir faire that enabled Austrians to discover structure beneath
multiplicity. Such deficiencies make it ironic that today's youth is seeking
what these men and women had found: capacity to see life whole and courage to
follow one's deepest impulses.” 428


“thanks to a few Austrians sprinkled across North America and Great Britain,
integrative thinking has not quite vanished. Since 1945, Arnold Hauser,
Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and
Ernst Gombrich have crowned their careers with wide-ranging syntheses.
Although today their scope and perspicacity dazzle us, fifty years ago their
work might have seemed almost routine. If we may for a moment indulge in wish-
fulfillment, we can discern in recent works by Polanyi, Hayek, Bertalanffy,
and Ehrenzweig the silhouette of a future society, which carries into a
technologized world qualities that energized Austrian thought. Each in his own
way, these Utopians call for new creativity grounded in individualism and
tolerance. By demanding that ego and id be liberated from outdated edicts of
superego, they preach receptivity to inner experience. Earlier, their plea for
spontaneity had been voiced by Schlick, Buber, Ebner, and Rank, the Austrians
who most explicitly anticipated tenets of today's youth.” 427f


“Hardly any Austrian Utopians have seen their dreams fulfilled. To be sure,
Herzl's Jewish state and Mayreder's balanced sexuality have become facts of
life, as has Loos's crusade against ornament. Most of the other visions seem
as quixotic as ever—whether Popper-Lynkeus' program for eradicating poverty,
Suttner's dream of peace, or Coudenhove-Kalergi's scheme for uniting Europe.
Together with embittered perfectionists such as Weininger and Broch, these
visionaries have received scant applause from a world that worships
efficacity.” 426


“No group personified the Janus-head of Habsburg institutions so conspicuously
as the Jews. One reason why Jews flourished in Austria was that centuries in
the ghetto had accustomed them to unmask and exploit self-deception in others.
Thriving on marginal conditions, they seized opportunity without having to
feel dishonored if thwarted. As if dissembling from themselves, Jewish writers
hid behind pseudonyms, among them Nordau, Altenberg, Friedell, Roda Roda,
Salten, Rank, and Wittels, not to mention the youthful Hofmannsthal. Eager to
vindicate themselves, some Jews like Freud, Kraus, Weininger, and Wittgenstein
became disillusionists, tearing the veil from time-honored conventions, while
others like Popper-Lynkeus, Hertzka, Herzl, and Buber, resorted to utopias.
Jewish fecundity had the tragic consequence of aggravating gentile envy and
fear, even as anti-Semite and insecure Jew together looked toward Germany as a
bulwark against Slavdom. It was an irony worthy of Habsburg contrivance that
the Jews, whom Austrian Germans insulted, should have revered German culture.
Through outspokenness and doggedness, the Jew became a Doppelganger of the
anti-Semite, flaunting qualities that the latter wished to extirpate in
himself. Duplicity in public life promoted creativity in private. In order to
cushion abrasive contact between nationalities, Austrians cultivated a
courtliness that mollified hostility. […] During the late nineteenth century,
the Habsburg Empire harbored the world's most diverse gene pool, where
interbreeding of races flourished. According to Darlington, interracial
populations tend to beget individuals of exceptional talent, as well as
persons of substandard ability who prey upon social services. Both of these
consequences abounded in Franz Joseph's empire.” 424


“Small wonder that here impressionism, with its gift for descrying latent
meaning behind every surface, blossomed into a world view. In Vienna, experts
at dissimulation, such as Bahr and Altenberg, professed to find no fixity
beneath a flux of sensations, while positivists, such as Freud and Mach,
ferreted out natural laws behind a welter of detail. Still others, like
Schnitzler and Schaukal, exhumed the Baroque cult of death in order to vivify
life.” 423


“Austrians, as distinct from Hungarians, suffered feelings of inferiority. As
Arthur Schnitzler wrote to his sister-in-law in December, 1914, the phrase
"really Austrian" (echt österreichisch) connoted disapproval, while to call
something "really German" was to praise it as "noble, strong, and beautiful."
In Austria as well as abroad, qualities that distinguished the Habsburg Empire
from more Westernized nations were censured— Schlamperei, Protektion,
particularism, and aestheticism—while the constructive side of these
traits—tolerance, magnanimity, independence, and creativity—went unsung.
Foreigners and Austrians alike have emphasized faults to the exclusion of
virtues; in the words of Vienna-born Ernst Stein (1901-1968), they have
interpreted Grace as shallowness and melancholy as a pose; surplus in moods as
a lack of principles; apparent facility at creating as superficiality; an
incomparable gift for apergus as minor form; irresistible atmosphere as local
color, but aspiring to what is European as presumption—a merry bed of
contradictions which has embittered the life of many a great man. These
paradoxes engendered attitudes that we have labeled hatelove, ambivalence, and
duplicity. When Freud declared that neurosis arises in hate-love for one's
parents, he was diagnosing the Austrian attitude toward country and self as
well. Ambivalence could culminate in self-hatred, as when Nestroy boasted, "I
believe the worst of everyone, including myself, and I have seldom been
wrong." Most acute in Jews, self-hatred could goad its victim to creativity or
cripple him with self-pity. Duplicity flourished amid institutions whose
workings blatantly contradicted their facade. The emperor, whose portrait hung
as a model of rectitude in every classroom, infringed common decency by
badgering family and subordinates. He affronted his son, neglected his wife,
harassed his successor's consort, and duped loyal servants. Outdated
institutions like press censorship were administered so slackly as to
caricature them. Other moldering regulations were ignored, reminding citizens
how capricious bureaucracy could be. Unchastity was blinked at in parish
priests, and common-law marriages multiplied because only non-Catholics could
divorce. While brothels catered to every class, university professors in 1900
pronounced a mural of nudes too lewd to deck their Aula. In 1879 a gigantic
public festival celebrated the twenty-fifth aniversary of an unhappy marriage.
The parade was staged by an egomaniac whose nudes could win acclaim because
they adorned historical settings. Within a bureaucracy where business
transpired in secret, everyone suspected intervention from above and
speculated about the "personal," to wit, the sexual. Playacting was part of
every transaction; each party knew how to regard another's cordiality as a
ruse. As Robert Musil put it: In this country a man always acted ...
differently from how he thought, or thought differently from how he acted.”
422f


Disconsolate anti-mechanism was voiced by Werfel, who implored Christians to
restore Gemeinschaft society in order to quench the auto-da-fé of technology:
The state, war, science are an endless chain of vampyric snares, which must be
soaked with blood in order to acquire the visage of life. The notion that
machines are bloodthirsty received classic formulation from Gustav Meyrink
(1868-1932) in his three-volume Des deutschen Spiessers Wunderhorn: Gesammelte
Novellen" 420


Wir waren kompliziert genug, die Maschine zu bauen, und wir sind zu
primitiv, uns von ihr bedienen zu lassen. Wir treiben einen Weltverkehr auf
schmalspurigen Gehirnbahnen." Kraus, "Apokalypse" [1908], in Werke, 8
(Munich, 1960)


"During August, 1914, Poles and Serbs of all ages were abducted from tourist
spas and imprisoned without a word to their families. In camps like those at
Gran or at Thalerhof near Graz, upper-class ladies from Poland were compelled
to bathe naked before jeering soldiers, while Slavic priests cleaned latrines.
Guards delighted in beating British civilians who could not pay bribes for the
privilege of residing under house arrest. As in the case of Kuncz's ordeal,
such terrorism has been largely forgotten. [...] The war brought an apocalypse
of industrialism, fulfilling what Kraus had proclaimed in 1908:


“Like Broch, Ebner, and Rank, Musil blamed rationality for thwarting self-
fulfillment.” 418


“Austrian writers have been perhaps the most trenchant foes of modernity.
Their critique derives from Biedermeier attitudes; nostalgia, love of
spectacle, fondness for the countryside, delight in minutiae, and passivity
toward bureaucracy have characterized nearly every Austrian intellectual since
1800. The debacle of 1848 reinforced these predilections, just when natural
science was winning respect as a mode of contemplative life. After 1870
prolonged economic dislocation frightened Austria's lower middle classes,
while nouveaux riches cultivated Biedermeier tastes. It was their offspring
who during the 1890's transformed aestheticism into impressionism. The next
generation was blighted by World War One, as dismemberment both of the empire
and of too many young men redoubled nostalgia. After 1918 Austrian
intellectuals were saying about their country's defeat what Karl Kraus had
written concerning the sinking of the Titanic, that this was God's revenge ex
machina on worshipers of the machine. Even after the war, most Viennese
continued to regard their city as the navel of the earth. Blending city and
country, nestled below vine-covered hills, and bathed by a mighty river,
Vienna seemed to have eluded many of the curses of metropolitan life. The
fulminations of Kraus aside, it was primarily in Prague that disenchantment
with cities festered. In Barbara, oder die Frömmigkeit, Werfel likened the
exodus of peasants toward the city to a great flight, an escape from community
into the anonymity of the crowd. Bohemian-born Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), best
known for surrealistic drawings, wrote an antiutopia, Die andere Seite: Ein
phantastischer Roman (Munich, 1909), which portrayed an industrial city as a
madhouse ruled by an unseen tyrant. Ehrenfels blamed the city for increasing
alcoholism, syphilis, and neglect of children, as technology prevented natural
selection from killing the unfit. The Moravian-born Jew Jakob Julius David
(1859-1906) deplored the deprivations of rural students who languished at
Vienna. Among the Viennese, Herzl wanted Jews to return to the soil, freed
from necessity to flaunt urban values. Kokoschka detested the amassing of
people in cities too small for them, while in "Vorstadt im Föhn" Salzburg-born
Trakl pictured blood from slaughterhouses besmirching a suburb. In poems like
"Die Teilnahmslosen" and "Die Dinge und Wir," Alfons Petzold complained that
factories manufacture men into machines; instead of rejoicing in God's
handiwork, laborers cower before their tools.” 417f


Anti-Modernity


"Although more disenchanted than either Hertzka or Herzl, Nordau became by far
the more popular writer. In Die konventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit
(Leipzig, 1883), which went through ten editions within a year, Nordau
restated in flamboyant rhetoric the outcry of the French Enlightenment against
traditional institutions such as church, monarchy, aristocracy, and marriage.
To counteract duplicity, he advocated a natural ethics based on Ludwig
Feuerbach's notion of solidarity; someday, Nordau believed, the word
"humanity" would cease to be an abstraction, designating instead a feeling of
brotherhood shared by all men. Nordau won added fame by assailing fin-de-
siécle morals in the two-volume Entartung (Berlin, 1892-1893). Extending
research begun by the criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), Nordau
branded contemporary art as degenerate (entartet). Invoking Darwin's theory of
useful variations, Nordau postulated that a genius advances life, while a
degenerate person regresses. Nordau repudiated Lombroso's thesis that genius
entails neurosis. Genius is progressive and unique, whereas degeneracy is
atavistic and self-multiplying. In modern times, regressiveness is rampaging.
In place of Enlightenment ideals of brotherhood and self-sacrifice, Nordau
discerned among the upper classes and intellectuals a cult of mysticism,
celebrated by Verlaine, Tolstoy, and Maeterlinck. In the diabolist Baudelaire,
the aesthete Oscar Wilde, and the sadist Friedrich Nietzsche, the Hungarian
diagnosed egomania, while love of filth mars the naturalistic works of Zola
and Gerhart Hauptmann. With imperturbable self-confidence, Nordau endorsed
Hanslick's critique of Wagner, whom he dubbed a masochist; he dismissed Pre-
Raphaelites and Ruskin as mystics; he disparaged Tolstoy's asceticism as a
revival of the Skoptsi sect; and he contrasted Baudelaire's cult of the
prostitute with the chaste emotions of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea (1798).
Puvis de Chavannes displays degeneracy by painting dull shades as if he were
color-blind. Despite admiration for the Enlightenment, Nordau's roots lay in
preindustrial Hungary. Extolling the fellow-feeling of particularistic
society, Nordau contended that in Paris and Berlin desire for self-
gratification is loosening bonds of brotherhood. Like the benign anarchist
Peter Kropotkin, the Hungarian implored industrializing society to restore
virtues inherent in nature. Nordau explained that contemporary regressiveness
results from wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railroads, steamships,
telephones, telegraphs, and factories. Modern degeneracy spreads faster than
that of Imperial Rome because the earlier epidemic had infected primarily the
lower classes, whereas today corruption begins at the top and filters
downward." 388f


“A third Jewish utopian from Budapest, Max Nordau (1849-1923), is remembered
chiefly as a lieutenant of Herzl. The son of a rabbi named Südfeld, Nordau
received a doctorate in medicine at Budapest in 1876, before moving his
practice to Paris four years later. There he won fame for a series of
feuilletonistic treatises that indicted industrial civilization for causing
degeneration. Nordau met Herzl in 1895, ten years later succeeding him as
leader of political Zionism while spending the rest of his life in Paris.” 388


“Freiland, said Herzl, epitomized a utopia because there existed no pressing
evil for it to relieve, whereas a Jewish state would liquidate a grievance.”
388


“A second Budapest-born utopian active in Vienna, the journalist Theodor
Hertzka (1845-1924) gained far less renown than Herzl. Having absorbed the
political activism of Hungarian intellectuals, Hertzka studied at Vienna where
for a time he joined Carl Menger's school of economics. During the 1870's he
served as economics editor of the Neue Freie Presse, and from 1886 to 1901 he
edited the Vienna weekly Zeitschrift für Staats- und Volkswirtschaft, where he
advocated free trade and cooperative ownership of land. Like Popper-Lynkeus he
prided himself on daring to propound simple solutions: during the early
1890's, he urged resolving the bimetallic crisis by minting coins from an
alloy of nine parts silver to one part gold. Hertzka won fame through a
futuristic novel, Freiland: Ein soziales Zukunftsbild (Leipzig, 1890). It
described how a group of educated Europeans colonize an International Free
Society among Masai in the mountains of Kenya until after several generations
the Society has girdled the globe. Hertzka's key proposal was to forbid rent
and interest: land and capital would be furnished free of charge to
entrepreneurs, who would compete for modest profit once they need no longer
fear bankruptcy through usury. Although no one would own any of the free land
or capital, all would share the common supply. Echoing Karl von Vogelsang and
Anton Menger, Hertzka taught that economic growth was lagging because workers
received too little income to consume what they manufactured. By abolishing
interest, Hertzka aimed to lower prices without scuttling individualism.
Freiland reflected debate on the status of women by arguing that women devote
themselves to attracting men chiefly because lack of legal rights precludes
taking pride in their own achievements. Like Auguste Comte, Hertzka wanted to
exclude women from competition with men so that they could care for children,
the sick, and the aged. In his effort to combine individualism with socialism,
Hertzka hailed Francis Bacon as the clearest and soberest of modern thinkers.
Hertzka's chief disciple was a Berlin-born Jewish physician Franz Oppenheimer
(1864-1943), who built a sociology around communal ownership of land. To
implement his utopia, Hertzka envisioned a Darwinian struggle between good and
bad social systems, insisting that through natural selection better systems
would supersede worse. For a time during the 1890's this faith proved
contagious, as Freeland associations sprouted all over Europe. In 1893 an
Australian, William Lane, established a Freeland Community of trade unionists
in Paraguay, which failed when the teetotaler Lane expelled members for
breaking a pledge of total abstinence. A year later a small colony in Kenya,
led by Julius Wilhelm, fared no better. In Entrückt in die Zukunft:
Sozialpolitischer Roman (Berlin, 1895), Hertzka ceased advocating Freeland in
order to portray the world two hundred years hence in the manner of Bellamy's
Looking Backward (1888). The utopian economist foresaw economic abundance,
aviation, independence of wives and children, and other amenities to which
Freeland communities had aspired.” 387f


“By uniting the best qualities of the Hungarian and the Jew, Herzl scandalized
the Viennese.” 387


“Third, Herzl represented a kind of Josephinist conservative, who sought to
bolster the status quo by persuading monarchs that Jewish revolutionaries
should emigrate. Imbued with faith in bureaucracy and concern for the whole of
society such as marked Austrian Catholic philosophers, Herzl envisioned a
conservative revolution that would remove agitators for change. Once rid of
troublesome Jews, Christian Europe could achieve equilibrium. As mentioned
previously. Herzl deemed the Jews a conservative people, and he offered to
help other conservatives like the German emperor and the pope to safeguard
their values. However quixotic this policy may seem, it accorded with the
Josephinist practice of protecting stability by banishing troublemakers.” 386


“he was a utopian in the manner of Hungarian nationalists, resembling other
Budapest-born. Jews like Hertzka and Nordau, whom he equaled in moral fervor
and surpassed in skill as an organizer. As intellectuals born in Hungary,
these publicists took it for granted that a writer should agitate. Fortifying
Herzl's zeal was a Hungarian gift for improvisation. Exuding délibáb, he
undertook gambits that rivaled episodes out of Jókai, as he strove to enlist
in common cause the pope and the king of Italy or to interview the emperor of
Germany at Istanbul. Although he regarded Hungary —together with England—as
one of two havens for assimilated Jews in Europe, boyhood as a German and a
Jew in Budapest had schooled him to think first in terms of nationality.
Incited by Magyars to yearn for national identity, he identified himself
initially with the Germans of Austria and later with the Jews. Second, Herzl
utilized techniques of mass movements which he had learned from the German-
National club at the University of Vienna. He sought for Jews the kind of
autonomy that Georg von Schönerer had been demanding for Austria's Germans. At
Zionist congresses, Herzl improvised the sort of inflammatory rhetoric with
which Schönerer and Lueger courted followers. Although Herzl wrote for the
favorite newspaper of Vienna's assimilated Jews, he repudiated their do-
nothing liberalism; likewise he impugned federalistic proposals by Austro-
Marxists, who regarded Jews not as a nationality but as a religion.” 385f


“Herzl interpreted anti-Semitism toward Western Jews as being economic in
origin. Through centuries of ghetto-living, Jews had so mastered commercial
skills that after emancipation they could compete at once with the gentile
middle class. In this struggle, a Jew often used fair means and foul, fearing
that if he failed he would sink into a proletariat but knowing that if he
succeeded he could acquire wealth impregnable to confiscation. All Jews
suffered because some preened as financial leaders while others fomented
revolution. […] By founding a Jewish state, Herzl hoped to spare others the
dilemma of choosing either to join the radical left or to cultivate self-
hatred. However much he had smarted under assimilation, Herzl remained at
bottom a conservative. His esteem for rural Jews entailed abhorrence of
revolution: that a highly conservative people, like the Jews, have always been
driven into the ranks of revolutionists, is the most lamentable feature in the
tragedy of our race. Unlike some other Zionists, Herzl claimed no special
virtue or talent for the Jewish race. He deemed the bulk of his people
unperceptive and unimaginative, notably urban Jews who belittled his dreams as
the wish-fulfillment of an ingenu.” 385


“Herzl was derided by Karl Kraus in a pamphlet Eine Krone für Zion (Vienna,
1898) and by other urbanized Viennese, who scoffed at sending Ringstrasse-
dandies to till the desert of Palestine. Orthodox Jews decried Zionism as a
blasphemy that usurped the function of the Messiah. Despite lampoons, Herzl's
movement flourished. At the time of Herzl's death, the Zionist bank in London,
the Jewish Colonial Trust, boasted 135,000 shareholders, then the largest
number financing any enterprise in the world.” 384


“Born in Budapest the son of an energetic and pious merchant, Theodor Herzl
(1860-1904) grew up feeling in a minority on two counts, as a Jew and as a
German. While in gymnasium he wrote a poem lauding Luther as champion of
Germany, and as a student of law at Vienna from 1878 to 1883, he participated
with Hermann Bahr and Heinrich Friedjung in a German-National student group
about which he planned to write a novel. […] he became Paris correspondent of
the Neue Freie Presse, arriving there in time to witness a tide of economic
anti-Semitism unleashed by the Panama Scandal. In 1894 he was appalled to see
France cementing an alliance with Russia at the very moment when pogroms were
decimating Ukrainian Jewry. The indifference of Western Jews to religious and
economic anti-Semitism incited Herzl in 1895 to draft his proposal for a
Jewish state.” 383


"Regarded by the populace as a necessary evil, gypsies resembled rural Jews by
parading exotic dress and language while suffering a similar reputation for
craftiness. Jews, of course, were far more industrious, prospering both at
agriculture and finance, and they flocked to cities, which the gypsies
shunned. Whereas urban Jews became the most industrialized and most
intellectual of Austria-Hungary's nationalities, gypsies remained at the
opposite extreme. Although their cohesiveness withstood every attempt at
Westernization and Magyarization, they too fell victim to Hitler." 382


"Gypsies occupied a special place among minorities in Hungary. Upon their
appearance in 1417, they were welcomed as blacksmiths in an economy shifting
from pastoral to agricultural. They owed their cohesiveness to their origin as
a caste of musicians in India—the Dorns —for whom birth constituted an
indelible mark of identity. Up to 1750 they were respected as Christian
refugees from the Turks, until their resistance to settlement under Maria
Theresa and Joseph II made them pariahs. After a Hungarian linguist Istvan
Valyi had discovered in 1763 similarity between Hindi and the gypsy language
Romany, the language was studied by among others Archduke Joseph (1833-1905),
who in 1888 published a grammar of Romany written in Hungarian. Gypsies
retained a number of taboos, among them a prohibition against the slaughter of
horses and a dread of corpses. Dying gypsies were abandoned to expire in the
open air; midwives and women in childbirth were also considered impure.
Because they despised manual labor, gypsies excelled as thieves, working in
teams whose loyalty baffled police. Gypsies also possessed an extraordinary
sense of direction, rivaling American Indians in skill at tracking. Since the
seventeenth century, gypsy musicians entertained Hungarian magnates"
(Johnston 1983:381f)


“To protest violations of the Law of Nationalities, in 1892 a uniate priest
led a deputation of three hundred Romanian intellectuals and peasants to
petition Franz Joseph. Not only were they refused an audience with the
emperor, but after they had published a manifesto of their grievances, they
were prosecuted at Klausenburg for "incitement against Magyar nationality," to
wit, advocating secession. For having attempted to exercise a constitutional
right, the five leaders landed in jail for terms of two-and-one-half to five
years; as usual, authorities in Vienna declined to intervene. It was in vain
hope of rectifying such injustices that in 1906 the Romanian Aurel Popovici
(1863-1917) proposed a federal system for dividing Austria-Hungary into
fifteen nations. In 1869 the Serbs and Croatians who had safeguarded the
southern military frontier since 1690 were consigned to Hungarian rule. Franz
Joseph rewarded 170 years of loyalty by abrogating the Privilegia with which
Leopold I had guaranteed autonomy. The inventor Michael Pupin (1858-1935)
recalled how grieviously this betrayal shocked the Croats, coming just three
years after they had won the battle of Custozza and twenty years after they
had helped vanquish Kossuth. [...] After the military frontier had been merged
into Croatia, this semi-independent province became so restive that in April,
1912, Hungary suspended its constitution and placed the land under a dictator,
Cuvaj. Once again Austrian authorities refused to intervene in what was deemed
a purely Magyar affair. […] After 1848, the rift between Romanians and Magyars
had become irreparable. In that year Austrian agents had provoked Romanian
peasants to rise against their masters; Magyar nobles were buried alive and
had their tongues cut out, leaving bitterness that precluded all sympathy for
the subject race.” 380


“Accustomed to indulge flights of fancy as well as to labor for a higher goal,
these Hungarian Jews pioneered innumerable technological marvels. Nationalism
combined with love of improvisation provided ideal incentive for inventors.
[...] Although numerous Austrians, among them Karl Lueger and Franz Ferdinand,
denounced Magyar tyranny, it received widest publicity from a Scotsman, Robert
W. Seton-Watson […] A bare handful of Romanians learned sufficient Magyar to
attend gymnasium and even fewer entered university. In Transylvania all
judges, lawyers, and jurors were Magyars, even where one Romanian was suing
another.” 379


“In some measure, Magyar chauvinism compensated for the isolation inevitable
for speakers of a non-Indo-European language, which foreigners rarely learned.
On the one hand, Hungarians cultivated an exuberant pride in their ancestors,
exuding self-satisfaction. [...] This inherited sense of achievement abetted
improvisation. Freed from necessity to prove oneself, a Magyar could indulge
fantasy with impunity. On the other hand, an innate sense of superiority
goaded Hungarians who lived abroad to vindicate the brilliance of their
countrymen. Because Magyar literature and culture were all but unknown,
Hungarians abroad had to start from scratch if they wished to demonstrate the
accomplishments of their nation.” 378


“Still another flowering of Hungarian improvisation occurred in an unduly
neglected English-language essayist of Hungarian birth, Emil Reich
(1854-1910). A Catholic born at Preschau in Slovakia, Reich studied at Prague,
Budapest, and Vienna before dwelling in the United States from 1884 to 1889.
After a sojourn in Paris, from 1897 to 1910 he settled in London as a writer
and lecturer. Flaunting a brilliant feuilletonistic style, in numerous books
and articles he extolled Hungarian imperialism as a wave of the future, which
would benefit southeastern Europe in the way that Rome and Great Britain had
uplifted their colonies. He regretted that Hungary had not become the Prussia
of the Habsburg Empire. Reich characterized Zionism as an aberration arising
from Jews' lack of national feeling. Incapable of the chauvinism that spurred
gentile Hungarians, rootless Jews invited economic anti-Semitism. Preoccupied
by power politics and national character, Reich used the term "geo-politics"
as early as 1908, eight years before the Swedish sociologist Rudolf Kjellen”
377


“In contrast to Austrians, Hungarians expected writers to participate in
politics and to be feted for it. Spared the hate-love that the Viennese public
inflicted on its favorites, after 1850 Hungarian writers basked in the
approval of their countrymen,” 375


“counties were ruled throughout the nineteenth century by a clique of magnates
and gentry. In 1898 a so-called Slave Law empowered owners of large estates to
use corporal punishment against striking agricultural workers, and to recruit
press gangs at harvest time, practices that continued after 1920. Small wonder
that peasants emigrated from Hungary in ever-increasing numbers. Between 1890
and 1910 about one and one-half million citizens of Hungary landed in the
United States; 340,000 Austro-Hungarians arrived during 1907 alone. The wealth
and prestige of the Roman Catholic church provided another obstacle to
modernization. Although the Counter-Reformation had never stamped out
Calvinism or Lutheranism, by 1900 the church held in Hungary the largest
estates it possessed anywhere in Europe. As late as 1910 the church directed
two-thirds of the schools. Whereas the hierarchy defended Magyarization, Pope
Leo XIII spoke out against the oppression of the Slovaks and the Ruthenes.”
365


“The vast majority of the nobility were merely freemen, belonging to the class
of lesser nobility or gentry, who derived from the medieval servientes regis.
Very few nobles belonged to the class of magnates, who constituted the
aristocracy of Hungary and attended the upper house of the diet. A proper name
ending in the suffix i or, still more refined, y, both of which denoted place
of origin, bore the same significance as the German "von" and the French "de."
Further to distinguish shades of difference in rank, the Hungarian language
offered as many as fifteen formulas of address for lofty personages. […] Even
after 1930, both the middle and upper classes considered it demeaning for a
freeman to perform menial tasks such as carrying a shopping bag in public;
domestic servants peopled every household. As a further sign of feudal
customs, dueling persisted down to 1944. [...] Although in 1850 Alexander Bach
had liberated the peasants of Hungary, in contrast to Joseph II's reform in
Austria and Bohemia, Bach deprived the peasants of land, leaving farmers
abjectly dependent on magnates and gentry.” 364


“Perhaps half the Magyars who were not peasants or servants could claim a
title of nobility, so that in 1848 1 out of 14 persons in Hungary was
classified as a nobleman (nobilis), as contrasted with 1 of 353 in Austria and
1 of 828 in Bohemia. In 1867 466,000 Magyar nobles lived in Hungary in
addition to 80,000 non-Magyar nobles in Transylvania. During the 1920's one
out of five Hungarians claimed to be a nobleman and one of seventy an
aristocrat.” 363


“The two states were so thoroughly separated that a resident of one had to
change citizenship before he could vote in elections of the other. […] The
three common ministries were supervised by delegations, one from the Austrian
and one from the Hungarian Parliament, which like international commissions
met separately to vote the budget and determine policy. Every ten years the
Ausgleich had to be renegotiated like any other treaty. Each parliament
appointed a deputation to barter over the proportion of the common expenses
each country would contribute. […] Until 1897 Hungary contributed a share
(Präzipuum) of 31.4 percent, paying 34.4 percent thereafter. [...] The
Hungarian franchise remained one of the most restrictive in Europe. In 1874
the property qualification was raised so that instead of 6.7 percent only 5.9
percent of the population could vote. The ruling gentry opposed every attempt
to enact universal suffrage. Under Andrassy and Kalman Tisza (1830-1902),
Hungary furnished the chief stumbling block to every sort of reform in Austria
as well as at home. Magyar aristocrats like Andrassy, Kalnoky, and Kallay
directed the joint ministries at a time when Austrian nobles were abandoning
politics. Hungarian leaders warned the Austrians not to inaugurate federalism
in the western half of the empire, lest the subject peoples of Hungary be
incited to rebel.” 362


“In contrast with the Czechs, who after 1850 disdained to write German, many
Magyars disseminated their views through treatises composed in German. […] the
awkward compromise (Ausgleich), whereby in 1867 Hungary and Austria became
partners. Planned by Ferenc Deak (1803-1876) and Gyula Andrassy (1823-1890) to
appease demands for self-rule and granted by Franz Joseph as a last resort,
the compromise established not one or two, but three governing bodies. These
were: first, the royal (königlich) kingdom of Hungary; second, the imperial-
royal (kaiserlich-königlich or k. k.) domain of the Austrian crownlands; and
third, the three imperial-androyal (kaiserlich und königlich or k. u. k.)
ministries run jointly by Austria and Hungary. The joint ministries directed
foreign affairs, the military, and the finances connected therewith. The
Austro-Hungarian army bore in its title the letters k. u. k., while the
universities of Austria were labeled k. k., and those of Hungary merely k.”
361


Hungarians


“Arrayed against such fanaticism, the serenity of reformers such as Popper-
Lynkeus, Suttner, and Coudenhove-Kalergi proved futile. Their devotion to the
good of the whole would be parodied— and overwhelmed—by totalitarianism.” 358


“Far more invidious—and somewhat unfair to Chamberlain—is the parallel between
his demand for racial purity and the Aryan cult of Adolf Josef Lanz
(1874-1954). This repugnant figure, who called himself Jörg Lanz von
Liebenfels, was rediscovered after 1945 by Wilfred Daim. Born at Vienna the
son of a teacher, Lanz studied from 1893 to 1899 as a Cisterican novice at
Stift Heiligenkreuz near Mayerling before becoming an independent writer. As
early as 1903 he marshaled algebraic symbols and enormously wide reading to
prove that, in the words of the Rig-Veda, "The earth belongs to the Aryan."
From 1905 to 1931 he published at Vienna a journal, Ostara, whose readers
included Kraus, Strindberg, Lord Kitchener, and Hitler. In 1909 the latter
visited Lanz to request some missing back numbers. Lanz proposed
reestablishing the Knights Templars as an order of Aryans; to mark their
proposed seat atop Burg Werfenstein in Upper Austria, he unfurled on December
25, 1907 a flag bearing a swastika. The name "Ostara" Lanz took from a
Germanic goddess of dawn and spring mentioned by Bede and Jacob Grimm. In his
Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflinge und dem Götterelektron
(Vienna, 1905), this monomaniac portrayed a future society in which racial
purity would prevail. As if to mock Christian von Ehrenfels' program of
polygamy, Lanz urged that a blond heroic race be raised in secret by
cloistered mothers. In school Aryans would learn a master religion, being
trained to use sterilization and castration in order to exterminate impure
races. These lower races Lanz dubbed Tschandalen after a low Hindu caste
disparaged by Nietzsche. Lanz delighted in comparing them to apes. His Gnostic
vision posited a struggle to the death between Aryans and Tschandalen, with
triumph assured to the blond, blue-eyed elite. In Austria, Lanz's cult
remained a joke, a kind of caricature of Schönerer's German-Nationalists as
well as of Richard von Kralik's Gralbund. So long as Lanz's sinister proposals
were confined to Austria, they could remain one among other harmless
eccentricities. But as soon as Hitler transplanted them to Germany, the
fantasies of Lanz, and to a lesser extent those of Chamberlain, threatened
civilization. At first glance, Bohemian Reform Catholicism seems remote from
the therapeutic nihilism of Gumplowicz or the racism of Chamberlain. These
Social Darwinists, albeit unwittingly, espoused a secular faith that
caricatured the confidence felt by Bolzano or Spann in God's Providence.
Whereas Reform Catholics held that God guides human conflict for the good of
all, Social Darwinists affirmed similar purposefulness without invoking God.
Within every society, a single group must hold sway in order to elicit the
best energies of the whole. Wielding the supremacy of a humanized Providence,
an elite may rule through disillusioned cunning, as in Gumplowicz, or by
rational planning, as in Ratzenhofer, or by virtue of pure breeding, as in
Chamberlain. These publicists justified their proposals by distorting
arguments dear to Reform Catholics.” 357f


“he averred that David and Christ had been Aryans while Moses and Paul had
been Jews. Unlike Gumplowicz, Chamberlain deplored conflict or any other
contact between races. He wanted to see each race left to develop in
isolation, without the intermarrying that great empires such as the Roman or
Habsburg promoted. He might have been speaking of Austria-Hungary when he
wrote: [This is the tragedy of European history] ... that the inherited
culture of antiquity ... was not transmitted to us by a definite people, but
by a nationless mixture without physiognomy, ... in which Mongrels held the
whip-hand, namely, ... by the raceless chaos of the decaying Roman Empire.
Chamberlain's contempt for imperial policies of racial mixing was no doubt
reinforced by the hysteria of German deputies who during the Badeni debates of
1897 recoiled at the prospect of being lumped with Czechs. Chamberlain
assailed socialism on grounds that it too abetted racial mixing. In
championing the Teutons (Germanen), whom he defined to include not only the
Germans, French, and English, but all anticlericals, Chamberlain echoed the
pan-Germanism of Georg von Schönerer, whose admiration for the Reformation he
shared. Chamberlain denounced the Roman Catholic church which as heir to the
raceless Roman Empire had impeded differentiation of races. He prized Catholic
culture, nevertheless, as a heritage that every Protestant should know. In an
article that he contributed in 1902 to Die Fackel—a periodical that he read
regularly—Chamberlain argued that Catholicism and Protestantism were feuding
brothers, who had more to gain by cross-fertilizing than by vilifying each
other.” 356f


“Thanks to the success of his two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1899), in 1901 Chamberlain became a friend of the German
Emperor Wilhelm, who sensed in the Englishman a kindred spirit capable of
appreciating the emperor's vision. Chamberlain had systematized the ideas of
Count de Gobineau, Wagner, and Nietzsche into an instrument of both high
learning and destructiveness. After 1900, he gravitated toward disaffected
German intellectuals like Paul de Lagarde and Moeller van den Bruck. Having
divorced his half-Jewish wife Anna Horst after nearly thirty years of
marriage, in 1908 he married Eva Wagner, the composer's daughter, moving a
year later to Bayreuth and becoming a German citizen in 1916. […] Like
Spengler after him, Chamberlain was fascinated by the morphology of plants, an
interest that both men derived from Goethe. In studying plant physiology,
Chamberlain indulged a predilection for individuals and species that exhibited
purity of form. A fancier of dogs, the Englishman held an animal-breeder's
opinion of race: thoroughbreds alone possess pedigree. Like another admirer of
Wagner, Christian von Ehrenfels, Chamberlain employed the word Gestalt to
designate the integrating principle of form. He and Ehrenfels both lamented a
leveling of human excellence, which Chamberlain, more dogmatically than
Ehrenfels, attributed to interbreeding of races.” 355


“From 1889 to 1909 there lived at Vienna the renegade son of a British
admiral, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927). It was during these twenty
years of immersion in Austrian culture that the Englishman wrote his major
works—entirely in German. In contrast with Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer,
Chamberlain was not a sociologist but a publicist for Germanic superiority.
The sociologists' dialectic of conqueror and conquered became for him a
struggle between Teutons and non-Teutons, which he hoped would end not in
mixing of races but in their purification. Born near Portsmouth, the
Protestant Chamberlain was tutored in German by the theologian Otto Kuntze.
After ten years of study at Geneva and Dresden, he came to Vienna to pursue
plant physiology under the Jewish scholar Julius von Wiesner (1838-1916). When
work at the microscope proved too nerve-racking, Chamberlain turned to
popularizing ideas of Richard Wagner, whom he had met in 1882 and whose widow
Cosima had become a close friend in 1888.” 354f


“Voicing moderate anti-Semitism, Ratzenhofer called for total assimilation of
Jews so that they might accelerate progress. While remarking that Jews make
first-rate officers, judges, and bureaucrats, Ratzenhofer warned that
employment as journalists or attorneys aggravates their racial faults. […] Had
he lived into the 1920's, Ratzenhofer might have gained a following among
Socialists at Vienna who were striving to fuse socialism with individualism.”
354


“Gradually the communalism of vanquished settlers blends with the
individualism of their conquerors to produce feudalism. Later capitalism
fosters an anarchic spirit that undermines the family and degrades labor.
Paralleling Karl von Vogelsang, Ratzenhofer believed that eventually
capitalism would give way to an era of settledness (Sesshaftigkeit), in which
class strife would yield to cooperation between workers and owners. This ideal
stage would vivify socialism with the energy of individualism”  353f


“Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842-1904) is remembered chiefly for having influenced
the Chicago Social Darwinist Albion W. Small. […] In a resume of his sociology
drafted for that congress, he characterized the United States as a land "whose
future centers about the solution of the race-problem." Ratzenhofer's
sociology matured from an analysis of social interest into a comprehensive
portrayal of capitalistic society. Unlike Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer strove to
make sociology a policy science: it should become doctor to the body social.
[…] Such a synthesis would rest on what Ratzenhofer called positive monism, by
which he meant Gumplowicz' doctrine that society, being part of nature, obeys
unalterable laws. Past human development ought to be scrutinized as basis for
forecasting the future, just as a tactician studies previous battles in order
to anticipate future ones. Ratzenhofer insisted that force would persist in
settling disputes, despite efforts by "women of both sexes" to supplant it.”
353


“In championing monistic method, Gumplowicz ranks as one of the founders of
sociology. With a faith in unchanging laws worthy of Bernard Bolzano or Robert
Zimmermann, Gumplowicz solaced himself by unmasking hypocrisy in a world rent
by strife. Few Social Darwinists have been so resigned and few therapeutic
nihilists so serene as this Pole who turned from agitation to contemplation.”
352


“Among states, Hobbesian morality prevails—for them force acknowledges no
higher authority—while for individuals there stands a constitutional framework
of private rights, which each state grants its citizens in order to maximize
prosperity. As a professor of law, Gumplowicz was among the first to introduce
systematic sociology to Austria. His theory of the origin of government has
been adopted by such German sociologists as Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Weber,
and Alexander von Rüstow, as well as by the historian Eduard Meyer. Gumplowicz
shared the sociologism of Durkheim, holding that what thinks and acts in a man
is not individuality but collectivity. Arguing that sociology studies the
"mutual relations and reciprocal effects of unlike social groups," Gumplowicz
contended that 'we can never conceive of man as an isolated being; for he
never can exist in isolation'. Opposing the individualism of Carl Menger's
economics and of the Austro-Marxists, Gumplowicz defended sociology as a
science of group behavior that must be a contemplative, not a policy-making
discipline. As if to ignore the therapeutic nihilism inherent in his
sociology, Gumplowicz was in private life a high-minded idealist, buoyant in
spirit and singularly devoted to his invalid wife. Gumplowicz respected the
opinions of those who impugned him. In 1896 he wrote to Bertha von Suttner
that although he could not endorse her "beautiful idea" of ending war, he
wanted her to persevere, oblivious to criticism such as his own. Gumplowicz
explained his ebullience by redefining optimism and pessimism: 'The pessimist
in world-philosophy is usually an optimist in life. The troublous course of
the world does not surprise him, he expects nothing better; he knows that the
world is evil, that it cannot be otherwise. ... The case is different with the
optimist in world-philosophy. Convinced that things might be better if man
will only better himself, ... he experiences constantly new disappointments
and falls from one despair into another. The optimist in world-philosophy
usually presents to us in life the picture called up by the word "pessimist."”
351f


“In spurning Gobineau's distinction between healthy and degenerate races,
Gumplowicz repudiated use of war as a eugenic device.” 351


"Gumplowicz devised his theory of rule by conquest in order to rationalize
failure as a nationalist in Galicia. He incorporated into sociology two myths
current among Polish nobles. First was the legend that the three races of
Poland descended from the sons of Noah: the aristocracy from Jephtha, Slav
peasants from Ham, and German Jews from Shem. A second theory held that the
aristocracy descended from Norman conquerors, while peasants derived from
autochthonous Slavs. By exploiting oral traditions that equated class with
race and rule with conquest, Gumplowicz could explain the refusal of Polish
peasants and Jews to back a nationalist movement that they associated with
aristocrats. Frustration as an agitator made Gumplowicz into a therapeutic
nihilist. In contrast to Jozsef Eotvos, who held a similar view about the
would-be imperialism of every nationality, Gumplowicz believed that little
could be done to alleviate strife in Austria-Hungary. He belittled reform
proposals like those of Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and Aurel Popovici, warning
that: Human "freedom" is but the freedom of the captive lion to run to and fro
in his cage and to follow the menagerie, cage and all, hither and thither,
through city and country.  Like most Galician Poles, Gumplowicz abhorred
Russia. In Sociologie und Politik (Leipzig, 1892), he vilified the Asian
hordes massing against Europe."([Johnston 1983:350f](zotero://open-
pdf/library/items/GGR6FKY8?page=350))


“the son's suicide had no bearing on Gumplowicz's own, which he committed
together with his invalid wife in August, 1909, to forestall death by cancer
of the tongue. Rasse und Staat, retitled in a revised edition Der Rassenkampf
(Innsbruck, 1883; 2d ed., 1909), earned Gumplowicz a reputation as le terrible
Autrichien.” 350


“Among the nearly forgotten theorists of the Habsburg Empire were several
Social Darwinists who anticipated later trends in sociology. Two of them,
Ludwig Gumplowicz and Gustav Ratzenhofer, gained wide hearing in the United
States, while a third, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, won notoriety. All three
evinced concern for the good of society as a whole; their secular parody of
Bohemian Reform Catholicism would be put into practice by totalitarianism.
Descended from a family of rabbis, Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838- 1909) was born and
educated in the strife-torn city of Krakow. In 1862 he took a law degree there
after several years of study at Vienna. As an attorney in Krakow, he defended
an anti-Habsburg revolutionary, having befriended in 1863 insurgents rebelling
against Russian Poland. In 1866 Gumplowicz was denied a habilitation by the
Krakow Faculty of Law on the grounds that his Polish patriotism precluded
scholarly objectivity. The frustrated lawyer turned to journalism, founding
the Polish paper Kraj (Fatherland) to assail Goluchowski's pro-Habsburg
clericalism. While editing the paper from 1869 to 1874, Gumplowicz was unable
to win the Polish and Jewish middle class to the cause of anticlerical
nationalism. An embittered failure at age thirty-six, he took the advice of a
former teacher, Gustav Demelius, to apply for a teaching post at Graz, which
he won in 1876 with the dissertation Rasse und Stoat. At about this time he
converted to Protestantism. As a docent and then a professor at Graz,
Gumplowicz followed closely events in Galicia, besides reading with passion
poets of Young Germany such as Heine and Gutzkow. Gumplowicz inspired his son
Maximilian Ernst Gumplowicz (1864-1897) to become a docent of Polish
literature at Vienna. In 1897 the son was jailed for traducing the state,
which young Maximilian in an extension of his father's theory had called "a
legally organized band of robbers." Convinced like Weininger that he could
never rectify social wrongs, young Gumplowicz killed himself in prison.
Although this blow shattered the older man, he found energy to edit his son's
papers on the Khazar origin of Polish” 349f


Social Darwinists


“A world traveler who spoke sixteen languages, the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi
believed in travel as the only means of prolonging life. While touring, he
said, one gained so many new impressions that each day one lived more fully
than one could at home. Unlike the footloose Count Adalbert Sternberg,
Coudenhove-Kalergi rejoiced in his estate, whose joys his son has described:
Such a life combined health with security, dignity, wealth, leisure, and
independence, giving ample opportunity to do much good to a whole region and,
at the same time, govern a tiny kingdom of one's own without political
responsibilities. Close contact with nature, with plants and animals, together
with all the elements of real culture made a beautiful, artistic and easy way
of life. Although the Coudenhove-Kalergi family numbered ancestors from Crete
and Brabant by way of Russia and Paris, it epitomized values of Bohemian
Reform Catholicism: altruism, piety, and oneness with nature.” 346


“The war of the future would be total, she wrote, because it was no longer
mere armies but entire nations that fought. […] Suttner believed that a shift
of women's approval from soldiers to men of peace could deter future wars.
After 1900, she feared above all a universal war that could destroy
civilization.” 345


“Bertha von Suttner […] persuaded her friend Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) to endow
the Nobel Peace Prize, of which she became the fifth recipient in 1905. […]
Bertha was appalled by the suffering of Russian soldiers during the Russo-
Turkish War of 1877-1878. She converted her home at Tiflis into a hospital for
the wounded and resolved to devote the remainder of her life to preventing
war. Upon returning to Vienna in 1885, she began to write pacifistic novels,
of which Die Waffen Nieder! Eine Lebensgeschichte (Dresden, 1889), became a
best seller. In this naturalistic narrative of the wars of 1866 and 1870, she
described her own experience at Tiflis, dramatizing the anguish of women whose
husbands and sons die or get mutilated on the battlefield.” 344


“Platonic metaphysics had degenerated into therapeutic nihilism. Viewing
himself as the last of his kind, the quixotic Broch wrote himself to death,
struggling to convince an elite how loss of transcendence had impoverished
them. His theorizing did nothing either to assuage his own despondency or to
salvage the world he mourned. A self-fulfilling prophecy, his Platonic
metaphysics cast a deathly glow on what little remained of the Leibnizian
vision.” 343


“For Broch, every secular intellectual is a heretic, just as every herd is a
renegade against Platonic order. Having stipulated these definitions, Broch
disclosed how secular dictatorship parodies and replaces the church's
universal dominion of the spirit. Because religion seeks above all to overcome
death, the hero too must confront and conquer death. This he does by
annihilating weaker persons so as to endow survivors with greater freedom. A
dictator exercises demagogic charm by proclaiming at once a desire to liberate
his people and constant readiness to face death. Dealing in death becomes a
dictator's trademark whereby he dupes secularized men into annointing him with
charisma formerly enjoyed by the church. The intellectual, once he has
jettisoned the Platonic world, stands helpless before the blandishments of
this merchant in death. Heedlessly the intellectual rallies to the dictator's
side, as together they set out to conquer the world. […] By repudiating the
modern world, Broch conceptualized a despair similar to that of Albert
Ehrenstein and Karl Kraus. His pessimism further resembled that of
Schopenhauer's disciple, the North German characteroiogist, Julius Bahnsen
(1830-1881), who saw man as impaled on a Hobson's choice between activity and
contemplation. Although only together can these opposites satisfy man, fate,
sighed Bahnsen, requires each individual to choose one or the other. Although
Broch himself elected first the active and later the contemplative life, he
could never forgive the majority of his contemporaries for having deified the
active life. Broch deemed a combination of action and contemplation
indispensable but impossible.” 342


“The Jewish novelist Hermann Broch (1886-1951) was also an exponent of the
renewed Leibnizian philosophy. In essays, many of them published posthumously,
this lonely thinker revealed himself as a metaphysician of considerable rigor,
who used Platonic categories in order to diagnose the spiritual ills of
modernity. The phrase "gay apocalypse" (frohliche Apokalypse) is one of many
oxymorons generated by Broch's interplay of irreconcilable opposites. Born in
Vienna, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer who had come from Olmütz in
northern Moravia, from 1908 to 1927 Broch managed the family business. As a
student at the Technische Hochschule, he admired the writings of Otto
Weininger, and he resented as keenly as did Ludwig Wittgenstein the upper
bourgeois circles in which both moved. In 1908 Broch converted to Catholicism,
probably to please his wife. Thereafter he bewailed the cleavage of empirical
science from speculative philosophy for which he blamed Mach and Boltzmann.
Having resolved in 1928 to live as an independent writer, he embarked for
three years on study of mathematics, philosophy, and psychology in order to
train himself to discourse on what he called the psychology of the masses
(Massenpsychologie). In 1938, after a brief imprisonment,. he emigrated to the
United States, where at a killing pace he churned out novels and treatises.
[…] matter, he specified, is an irrational force that impels heroes, while
spirit is a rational force that guides the church. The hero, said Broch, seeks
to implement with blood that dominion over the earth which the church once
exercised in a spiritual, that is, Platonic, way. Once society has ceased to
believe in a Platonic order of ideas, nothing can prevent people from
worshiping a hero.” 341


“As earnestly as anyone in the twentieth century, Spann empathized with the
Biedermeier mentality, revitalizing its encyclopedism, its faith in
Providence, its love of the past, and its indifference to political
vicissitudes. Had he lived a century earlier, Spann would have been honored as
a sage; a prodigy bom too late, he deserves acclaim for having restored a
tradition all but lost.” 341


“Almost without exception, Socialists have labeled Spann a Fascist. In an
article of 1936, the usually judicious Karl Polanyi stigmatized Spann as a
Fascist Hegel, who lacked the revolutionary dynamic inherent in the German. By
failing to distinguish is from ought, Spann made himself a fellow traveler of
fascism. In portraying a holistic society more all-enveloping than Hegel's
ever was, Spann had modeled society, said Polanyi, not on a person but on a
corpse. […] Universalism, which Spann intended to be descriptive rather than
prescriptive, offered willy-nilly a model of totalitarian society. Small
wonder that Heydrich, no less than Polanyi, regarded Spann as a potential
Nazi. Although Spann would have preferred to inhabit the kind of Gemeinschaft
society romanticized by Adam Müller, slowly he recognized the difference
between Müller's Biedermeier idyll and Hitler's police state.” 340


“Spann saluted idealism as the philosophy congenial to universalism because it
recognizes a "Higher than thou" (Über Dir), whereas empiricism, ally of
individualism, denies any hierarchy of entities surmounting the individual.
Expositing a deductive system similar to that of Aristotle and Aquinas, Spann
construed the whole as a final cause from which subtotalities derive purpose.
Social science can infer knowledge of subtotalities not from experiment, but
only from some higher totality. The structure of an economic system, for
example, must be deduced from the structure of the society it serves.” 339


“In reviving Adam Müllers (1779-1829) conception of Gemeinschaft society, he
asserted the Baroque-Biedermeier faith of Bolzano and Herbart in a social
order built upon eternal law. […] Spann analyzed the relation of the
individual to society in terms of what he called pairing (Gezweiung), a
concept that he modeled on Müller's notion of polarity (Polarität). Spann
recalled that around 1900 Müller was so little known that only by accident did
he in 1907 stumble upon the three volumes of Elemente der Staatskunst:
Öffentliche Vorlesungen (Berlin, 1809-1810). In affirming the priority of the
family, Müller had argued—while sketching a Catholic nature philosophy
comparable to Schelling's—that the pairing of man and woman furnishes the
basis of society. For Müller, other key dualities included youth and age, as
well as man and God. Similarly, Spann argued that mental life arises from
interaction of pairings such as mother and child, teacher and student, artist
and audience. Because neither member can play his role without the other, a
pair transcends either of its parts. However indispensable, each part is
inferior to the whole. Spann's universalism consists in assessing all
phenomena from the vantage of the whole rather than that of its constituents.
Reviving an argument dear both to Catholic apologetics and to Hegel, Spann
insisted that universalism does not demean individualism in the way that
individualism ignores the whole; rather universalism incorporates the
perspective of the individual into a larger framework. Individualism, said
Spann, jettisons the proposition that individuals flourish only in community.
Like Herbart—and Max Adler—Spann held that each mind grows by responding to
what others evoke in it. Far from being selfsufficient, each mind is a torch
that must be lit from outside itself.” 338


“The son of a small businessman who lived near Vienna, Spann studied at
Realgymnasium there before attending universities at Vienna, Zurich, Bern, and
Tübingen, where he earned a doctorate in 1903. After working for some years at
a research institute in Frankfurt, he received his habilitation in 1908. From
1909 to 1919 he served as a professor of political economy at Brünn, where he
succeeded fellow exponent of holistic economics, Vienna-born Friedrich von
Gottl-Ottlilienfeld (1868-1958). After being wounded during World War One,
from 1919 to 1938 Spann taught at the University of Vienna. In 1936, S.S.
leader Reinhard Heydrich tried unsuccessfully to recruit Spann and his
followers as Nazi propagandists. As soon as the Catholic foundation of Spann's
thought became obvious, he was deprived of his professorship in 1938 and
briefly imprisoned. From 1945 to 1950 he lived in retirement in the
Burgenland, falsely branded a Nazi-sympathizer.” 337


“Jewish inventor, Josef Popper (1838-1921), who dwelt at Vienna from 1858
until his death. Born and raised in the ghetto of Kolin, Popper studied
engineering in Prague from 1854 to 1858 before going to Vienna as an official
of the railroads. In 1867 he invented a steam valve, the proceeds of which
enabled him to retire in 1898 and write independently. A lifelong bachelor, on
his deathbed he married his companion of many years so that she might inherit
his wealth. He was a close friend of Ernst Mach as well as of Schnitzler,
Bahr, and Einstein. His disciples included the feuilletonist Fritz Wittels. In
1878 Popper proclaimed the first of many utopian proposals in Das Recht zu
leben und die Pflicht zu sterben (Dresden, 1878; 3d ed., 1903). Sketching a
rational society modeled on Voltaire's credo, Popper urged that military
service give way to universal alimentary duty (Nährpflicht). Every citizen
would serve a term in a nutrition army, which would provide food and shelter
gratis to all. Money would function only to purchase luxury goods, which
entrepreneurs might manufacture after completing alimentary duty. Popper
proposed overturning penal law. Lawbreakers would be subjected to public
ridicule instead of serving prison sentences. Popper expected that massive
publicity of misdeeds would dissuade miscreants from repeating offenses, and
they would be imprisoned only if nothing less could prevent recidivism. A
freethinker, Popper propounded a substitute religion rooted in a sense of
nature (Natursinn), which entailed reverence for the good of the whole” 334


“These hopes for mankind he stated in Die Religion der Zukunft (1929),
continuing to praise the study of "essential entities" such as integers and
musical notes as the only effective balm against earthly woes. Of the many
Austrian thinkers in our century whom scholars have ignored, Ehrenfels may
well have been the most original. He recognized how technology and social
upheaval threatened the contemplative ideal of Bohemian Reform Catholicism.
For him, Brentano's goal of maximizing the good of the whole necessitated
drastic changes in sexual ethics if God was to be saved from disaster.
Although he exchanged the Aristotelian notion of static harmony for a
Heraclitean vision of cosmic struggle, Ehrenfels retained Leibniz' conviction
that in the end reason would prevail. By resort to Gnostic cosmology,
Ehrenfels endeavored to prolong the Leibnizian world view in a world being
industrialized and proletarianized. This scion of aristocracy combatted
degeneracy by projecting onto the cosmos a vision of noblesse oblige: all men
of quality owe it to God to fight on His side against impending chaos. A
fervent Darwinist, Ehrenfels discerned a life-and-death struggle in every act
of procreation, succumbing to that worship of motherhood which racism entails.
Inhabiting a society rent by strife, he viewed the cosmos itself as reflecting
a contest between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, German and Czech.
However resolutely Ehrenfels labored to avert calamity, not even he foresaw
the disaster that was to come.” 333


“Alarmed as he was over the declining caliber of the race, Ehrenfels was
outraged by World War One. War caused counterselection among young men,
killing the bravest while sparing the unfit. To assuage his despair, he
composed the Kosmogonie (Jena, 1916), which tailored the Leibnizian vision to
a Marcionist cosmology. In it Ehrenfels elevated into a metaphysical principle
the eugenic premise that men must intervene to forestall degeneration: unless
man labors to maximize Gestalt, disorder may engulf the universe. Hailing
human intellect as God's partner in a cosmic duel between Gestalt and entropy,
Ehrenfels, like Schelling and Teilhard de Chardin, viewed man as cocreator
with God. So crucial was man's role in directing evolution that if he should
falter, God's edifice of Gestalt might collapse. Convinced, like Teilhard,
that disaster could and would be deterred, Ehrenfels predicted that through
technology man soon would effect a quantum leap in the inner coherence of the
world. Thus within a Gnostic framework, Ehrenfels renewed Leibnizian faith in
the triumph of reason. Although he may have been influenced by Brentano's
concept of the Creator, Ehrenfels differed from his teacher in rejecting God's
omnipotence.” 331f


“Ehrenfels proposed establishing homes where women could rear children in a
kind of kibbutz without men. […] In Sexualethik (Wiesbaden, 1907), Ehrenfels
argued that procreation was being neglected in favor of self-indulgence. It
was folly, the philosopher declared, to outlaw prostitution without
sanctioning other outlets for sexual desire; only divorce and polygamy could
supplant brothels. […] He warned that without such reform the "Mongol” race
would doom superior individuals to extinction. […] Hailing Jews as progenitors
of excellence, about 1910 he declared at a university meeting that he had had
a Jewish ancestor. 331


“The concept of Gestalt quality won world renown not through Ehrenfels or
Husserl but through students of Brentano's disciple Carl Sturnpf. About 1910
at Berlin, Prague-born Max Wertheimer (1880- 1943) developed a Gestalt theory
of perception that inspired Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. […] the
preference of Austrian thinkers for interpreting phenomena as a whole.
Ehrenfels himself became so preoccupied by ethics, social reform, and
cosmology that he scarcely noticed the currency that his concept gained among
empirical psychologists. In psychology, Ehrenfels rejected Brentano's view
that feeling (Gefühl) and desire (Begehren) belong to a common class of love
and hate. Desire and feeling, replied Ehrenfels, each may exist without the
other, and are as distinct as sensation and feeling. In his two-volume System
der Werttheorie (Leipzig, 1897-1898), Ehrenfels built this psychology of
desire into a systematic axiology, which combined Meinong's theory of objects
with Carl Menger's economic theory of value. Whereas Meinong held that an
object acquires value because it pleases us, Ehrenfels contended that the
things we most value cannot exist, for example perfect justice and complete
knowledge. These ideals we cherish not because they please us, but because we
yearn to possess them, however vainly. For Ehrenfels as for Menger, value is
measured by correlating the strength of desire with the availability of the
thing desired. [...] In more than twenty articles published from 1903 on,
Ehrenfels advocated polygamy as a panacea against the degeneration caused by
industrialism. Because technology prolongs life for the unfit no less than for
the fit, it thwarts natural selection of the most hardy. Large cities breed
diseases, like syphilis that denatures heredity, as well as alcoholism that
debases parenthood. Women scorn motherhood, indulging in pursuit of pleasure
instead of caring for infants. As Gemeinschaft virtues vanished, social
diseases would so weaken offspring, Ehrenfels predicted, that after one or two
generations mortality rates would resume an upward swing. The sole preventive,
Ehrenfels insisted, was to cultivate polygamy, so that the fittest men might
conceive children by a variety of robust women. He urged that Europe emulate
the Mongols and Muslims in exploiting polygamy by virile men.” 330


“Mnemonic devices such as jingles and caricatures embody Gestalt qualities,
which the mind retains more easily than their isolated constituents. Since
each Gestalt quality furnishes a pattern that the mind can relate to other
wholes, intellect functions by interweaving Gestalt qualities, so as to
encompass a maximum of data simultaneously. Creative thinking advances by
generating constantly broader Gestalt qualities, which impart order to an
ever-increasing range of experience.” 329


“Although he shone as a composer, dramatist, eugenicist, cosmologist, and
theorist of ethics, it is almost exclusively as the father of Gestalt
psychology that Ehrenfels is remembered. Born near Vienna, the eldest son of
an Austrian nobleman and a French mother, Ehrenfels attended not gymnasium but
an Oberrealschule. Spending one year at the Hochschule fiir Bodenkultur in
Vienna, he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Joseph Michael von
Ehrenfels (1767-1843), who had reformed methods of sheep-raising and of
apiculture with zeal such as his grandson would bring to eugenics. In October,
1882, Christian transferred his title and rights as heir to a younger brother
Bernhard, leaving himself free for literary activity. Christian had been
studying counterpoint and harmony under Bruckner, whose otherworldly
dedication helped to kindle Ehrenfels' own. So great was Ehrenfels' reverence
for Wagner that in 1882 he traveled on foot from Vienna to Bayreuth to hear
the premiere of Parsifal. During the 1880's Ehrenfels wrote choral dramas for
which he sought a composer in vain. Having taken a doctorate at Graz under
Meinong in 1885, three years later he earned habilitation under Brentano at
Vienna. He married Emma von Hartmann in 1894, and after some years of writing
plays and essays, the restless theorist accepted in 1897 a professorship of
philosophy at Prague, where he taught until 1929. Exceedingly popular as a
lecturer, Ehrenfels broke precedent by conversing with students after class.
Every year he offered lectures on Wagner in addition to courses in
epistemology and ethics. Ehrenfels wrote his most famous work, "fiber Gestalt-
Qualitäten" (1890) while still an independent scholar. In it he argued that we
perceive melodies by virtue of a form-quality (Gestalt-Qualität), which
inheres in the whole and is more real than individual parts. Ehrenfels took
his point of departure from Ernst Mach's Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen
(Jena, 1886), where the physicist had argued that in music and geometry we
perceive what he called tone-forms (Tongestalten) and space-forms
(Raumgestalten). Mach had noted that one can vary the color or size of a
circle without detracting from its circularity, that is, its space-form. To
clarify this insight, Ehrenfels applied Brentano's doctrine of intentionality:
the mind intends Gestalt qualities, supplying them to interpret the foundation
(Fundament) of data actually perceived. It was Ehrenfels' distinction between
foundation and Gestalt quality which Meinong developed into a dichotomy
between objects of a lower and of a higher order. Ehrenfels summarized a
lifetime of reflection on form-qualities in an article that he dictated to his
wife a few weeks before he died. A form-quality is "that perceived something
which is more and other than the mere sum of its constituent parts, although
they are essential to its existence."  When we listen to a melody, the
individual notes are retained in the memory to form a base (Fundament), on
which the mind erects a "founded content" (fundierter Inhalt) or Gestalt.
Although this unifying idea can emerge only in the presence of its base,
Ehrenfels held that the mind itself supplies the founded content, which is not
actually part of the base.” 328f


“Husserl elaborated these and other concepts in massive detail, leaving at the
Husserl-Archive in Louvain forty thousand pages of manuscript, many of which
have yet to be studied. He pursued his mission with unswerving devotion,
convinced that transcendental phenomenology alone can supply a science of mind
to salvage modern culture. Like Brentano he yearned to reinstate philosophia
perennis […] Max Scheler was influenced by reading Husserl, and Heidegger's
many students, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Lowith, have disseminated the
tradition. Roman Catholics have exploited the concept of noema in order to
investigate how eternal truths lodge in the mind.” 327


“By denying the very possibility of objective truth, psychologism overstates
its case and degenerates into skepticism.” 325f


“Like his fellow Austrian-born philosophers Emil Lask, Johannes Volkelt, and
Richard Honigswald, Husserl pursued his mature career entirely in Germany,
teaching at Halle (1887-1901), Gottingen (1901- 1916), and Freiburg
(1916-1929). With rare singlemindedness, he cultivated a vision of an entirely
objective "presuppositionless" philosophy, advancing quickly beyond Brentano
and Meinong to a view of logic akin to that of Leibniz and Bolzano. In his
first major treatise, the two-volume Logische Untersuchungen (Halle,
1900-1901), he attacked the subjective logic of empiricists like J. S. Mill
and Herbert Spencer, as well as Ernst Mach's principle of economy. Their
psychologism, Husserl argued, abolishes the objectivity of logical structures.
Husserl separated psychology from logic by pressing the reductio ad absurdum
that results if axioms of logic are held to derive from experience. The law of
contradiction itself would have to be discarded whenever men ceased to believe
it. On the contrary, says Husserl, this law will remain valid even if no man
ever believes it.” 325


“Many disciples of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) consider Brentano merely as a
precursor of their mentor, who himself revered Brentano as the man who had
guided him into philosophy. Born in Prossnitz, Moravia, of Jewish parents,
Husserl studied from 1876 to 1881 at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna under the
mathematicians Karl Theodor Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Upon
recommendation of his friend Tom&s Masaryk, he returned to Vienna from 1884 to
1886 to hear Brentano. It was Masaryk who persuaded Husserl to convert to
Protestantism. At a time when Husserl was still wavering—as Bolzano once
had—between philosophy and mathematics, Brentano's lectures persuaded the
young mathematician that philosophy merited serious endeavor.” 324f


“The very opposite of a therapeutic nihilist, Brentano hoped to stem decline
by reviving the perennial philosophy of investigation, epitomized by
Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke. In 1905 he composed a long poem
praising Anaxagoras (499-428 B.C.) as the father of philosophy.” 322


German Idealism
---|---|---|---
(Johnston 1983:321f)


Hume


The Enlightenment


Bacon to Locke


Modern


Lullus, Cusanus


William of Occam


Duns Scotus


Thomas Aquinas


Medieval


Neoplatonists, Neo-Pythagoreans


Skeptics, Eclectics


Stoics, Epicureans


Thales to Aristotle


Ancient


Mysticism


Skepticism


Application


Investigation


Phase


"Brentano deemed post-Kantian idealism a period of decline, dismissing the
idealists' cult of originality as adolescent. In 1895 he formulated a schema
of how philosophy had developed, arguing that it has traversed three cycles of
four stages from Thales to the post-Kantians. During each cycle an initial
stage of investigation (Forschung) has given way to successive stages of
degeneration which he labeled application (Ausbildung), skepticism (Skepsis),
and mysticism (Mystik). He periodized the three cycles of antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and modernity as follows:


“To know that a thing is good is to assert that love toward that thing is
right; similarly to say that a thing is bad to say that hatred of that thing
would be right. These views were shared by G. E. Moore [...] This lofty
conception of ethics echoed Bohemian Reform Catholicism. Like Bolzano,
Brentano disputed Kant's deontological ethics as well as Bentham's utilitarian
calculus. For both Catholics, the good is that which one can love
unconditionally: it must serve the interests of the whole of the universe and
should be loved without regard to attainability. In exalting the good of the
whole, Brentano strongly influenced Christian von Ehrenfels. Brentano's ethics
of the whole stemmed from unwavering faith in the Providence of God. [...] For
twenty years Brentano lectured on proofs for the existence of God, concluding
that indubitably there exists an eternal, creating, and sustaining principle,
which he called understanding (Verstand). Although he acknowledged that doubt
remains as to whether this principle is infinitely perfect and whether it is
unitary, Brentano—the ex-priest—was convinced that it manifests both these
qualities.” 320


“In a lecture during January, 1889, before the Vienna Law Society, he
formulated his ethics in reply to those of the jurist Rudolf von Jhering. Vom
Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (Leipzig, 1889) breathes the pure air of
intuitionist ethics. During the year in which G. E. Moore published Principia
Ethica (1903), that author called Brentano's work "a far better discussion of
the most fundamental principles of Ethics than any other with which I am
acquainted." Brentano propounded an axiological ethics, centering on the
theory of value (Werttheorie), as distinct from the neo-Kantian philosophy of
values (Wertphilosophie). Brentano assigned values to the third class of
experience: phenomena of love and hate.” 319f


“He exerted greatest influence by reviving Aristotle's concept of mental act.
In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Vienna, 1874; 2d ed., Leipzig,
1924), Brentano divided all mental phenomena into three classes of acts
(Seelentdtigkeiten). First, a presentation (Vorstellung) occurs whenever
anything is present to consciousness. Here Brentano revived the scholastic
term intentionality (Intentionalitdt) to denote the act whereby a mind intends
an object. Although this object may be either real or imagined, the act of
intending it imparts to it mental existence. Citing Herbart, Brentano insisted
that presentation underlies all psychic experience. As a second category,
judgments (Urteile) assert or deny the existence of an object presented. Upon
this concept, Brentano built several innovations in logic. He declared that
all categorical propositions are at bottom existential propositions. A
categorical statement such as "All men are mortal" he transposed into the
existential statement, "There is no immortal man." Even an axiom in geometry
has only a negative character: when we say that "All triangles have 180
degrees," we mean that "There is no triangle that does not have 180 degrees."
Brentano further postulated that every existential proposition resolves into
two propositions. When we declare that "This flower is yellow," we are saying
first, "This flower is," and second "It is yellow." Whereas the first
proposition affirms the existence or nonexistence of the subject, the second
asserts the existence or nonexistence of certain properties, or predicates.
Thus when the axiom "All triangles have 180 degrees" is transposed into its
double negative form, it affirms not that triangles exist but that their
properties exist. During his middle years, Brentano believed that every object
intended by the mind enjoys mental existence, so that contradictory properties
such as those of Meinong's golden mountain exist in the mind, albeit not in
the external world. As his third basic category, Brentano posited phenomena of
love and hate (Phanomene der Liebe und des Hasses). Any object presented may
be regarded with love or with hate. In this act Brentano insisted that will
and feeling become indistinguishable. These doctrines bore fruit above all in
empirical psychology. The notion of intentionality was applied to perception
by Brentano's Bavarian-born friend Carl Stumpf (1848-1936), who held that
every psychic act refers to an object outside itself. Through research on how
the mind relates to intended objects Stumpf stimulated his students to develop
Gestalt psychology. Brentano, on the other hand, never abandoned psychologism
in logic. In construing judgment to be a type of psychic act, he repudiated
Bolzano's doctrine of propositionsin-themselves. Instead of enjoying
extramental existence, propositions possessed for Brentano exclusively mental
existence. Both Meinong and Husserl rejected this view, reviving Bolzano's
Platonic conception. During his later period, Brentano revised his earlier
conception of mental existence. Now he argued that only concretely existing
objects can be intended by the mind, branding as fictions concepts like being
and nonbeing. When the mind thinks of an irreal object like a centaur, what it
intends is not —pace early Brentano—the properties of a centaur, but the mind
of a concrete person thinking about a centaur.” 318f


“Joining opposition to Pope Pius IX's proposed dogma of Papal Infallibility,
Brentano drafted a cogent memorandum against it for Bishop von Ketteler in
1869. Proclamation of the dogma in 1870 unsettled Brentano's faith because, as
he said, after repudiating this newest article of faith, he could for the
first time question dogmas that he had embraced since childhood. After three
years of soul-searching, on April 11, 1873, Brentano left the priesthood and
the church. Although his decision impelled Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty to do
likewise, Brentano never ceased believing in God; his thought remained steeped
in Christian values. In January, 1874, Brentano accepted a call—arranged in
part by Robert Zimmermann—to become a professor of philosophy at Vienna, where
until 1880 he lectured to overflow audiences, among whom were Sigmund Freud
and Tomas Masaryk. Although Austrian law forbade ex-priests to marry, in 1880
Brentano announced his intention to marry a baptized Jewish patrician, Ida
Lieben. Enforcing an antiquated rule, the university forced Brentano to resign
his chair, whereupon he took up residence in Leipzig long enough to be wed
there on September 16, 1880. Soon thereafter, he returned to Vienna as a
docent in philosophy, holding that position until the death of his wife in
1894. However much the demotion rankled, aversion to Prussia and Protestantism
precluded accepting a better post in Germany. Brentano continued to lavish
time and advice on students, inviting the more gifted to dinner at his home on
Friday evenings, as well as to his summer house on the Wolfgangsee. Unable to
tolerate Vienna after his wife had died, during December, 1894, Brentano
published five articles in the Neue Freie Presse, flaying official
ingratitude. From 1896 to 1915 he dwelt in Florence […] In 1897 he married
again, this time a Viennese woman with Italian citizenship; after Italy's
entry into the World War, the couple settled at Zurich. During his last years
of nearly complete blindness, his wife read to him, enabling him to correspond
with friends and pupils such as Anton Marty and Oskar Kraus. […] An avid
gymnast and swimmer, he frequently swam the Danube, and in addition to being
an enthusiatic cook and carpenter, he repeatedly tried writing poetry.” 317


“Brentano himself went through three phases: a youth of Catholic
neoscholasticism, a middle period of quasi-Aristotelian realism, and a later
period of empiricism. Throughout, he embodied values of Bohemian Reform
Catholicism. Bom on the Rhine near Koblenz, Franz Brentano was the son of a
physician, Christian Brentano. His uncle was the Romantic poet Clemens Maria
Brentano, and his aunt, Bettina von Arnim. Franz's brother, Lujo Brentano
(1844-1931), became one of Germany's leading advocates of state insurance for
workers. Destined for the priesthood, young Franz enjoyed the finest possible
education, living for a time in Berlin with his uncle the jurist Friedrich von
Savigny. In Munich in 1856 he heard lectures by the Catholic philosopher of
history Ernst von Lasaulx, and in Berlin he studied Aristotle under Adolf
Trendelenburg before taking a doctorate in absentia at Tübingen in 1862.” 316


“Apart from Steiner, Zimmermann exerted his most lasting impact on the art
historian Alois Riegl, who exploited his teacher's formalism as a weapon with
which to attack the art-materialism of Gottfried Semper. […] In the fine arts,
Zimmermann endorsed neoclassicism […] Zimmermann condemned romanticism for
introducing into art emotions that spoil the formal beauty of classical works.
An artist should excel by exercising ingenuity within the rules of his medium,
not by awakening pathological feelings in the beholder. […] His faith in an
objective world order, his hostility to subjectivism, and his indifference to
progressivism made him an epigone of Bolzano and Herbart in an age when new
currents had all but swept away the Leibnizian vision. […] Zimmermann did for
Viennese philosophy what Rudolf von Alt was doing for painting and Johannes
Brahms, with more distinction, for music. These men provided a living link
with the past, epitomizing in their person currents against which inventive
youth could rebel.” 315


“In 1874 Zimmermann was active in securing the call to Vienna of Brentano,
remaining after the latter's resignation in 1880 the only full professor of
philosophy at Vienna until 1896. In 1886 he served as rector of the
university, and in 1890 he joined his student, Moravian-born Emil Reich
(1864-1937), a devotee of Schopenhauer, in founding the Grillparzer Society.
[...] Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who saw in his teacher Zimmermann a model of
Goethe's manysidedness. It was from Zimmermann that Steiner borrowed the term
Anthroposophy to designate his own philosophy.” 314


"Robert Zimmermann: [...] This most gifted of Austrian Herbartians served from
1861 to 1895 as a professor of philosophy at Vienna, where he exerted a wide
influence on ethics and aesthetics." ([Johnston 1983:312](zotero://open-
pdf/library/items/GGR6FKY8?page=312))


“His practice of reworking concepts corresponded to the historicizing attitude
of post-1800 Vienna. His postulate of a reservoir of philosophical options
flattered Vienna's image of itself as sustainer and refiner of traditions,
where old elements might intermingle without disruption by new ones. Through
his pedagogy, Herbart aimed to teach men to understand what is already known,
rather than to goad them into making discoveries. He trained connoisseurs, not
creators, just as in philosophy he fostered scholars of the subject, not
creative geniuses. As in the historicizing architecture of post-1860 Vienna,
Herbart's reworking of concepts presupposed that there is nothing new under
the sun. Architects like Ferstel and Schmidt were Herbartians who worked in
stone. Finally there existed affinity between the metaphysical neutrality of
Herbart and the impartiality of Josephinist civil servants, who were
administering a codified heritage within a static universe. Thun was permitted
to enact his reform of education only after he had persuaded opponents that it
would fortify perennial values. [...] The placing of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason on the papal Index in 1827 had extinguished any chance of his being
heeded in Austria. Robert Zimmermann stood alone in recalling that Herbart had
regarded himself as a modified Kantian of the year 1828. A conspiracy of
silence stifled the pioneering Kantianism of Carl Sigmund Barach (1834-1885),
who as a docent at Vienna had dared in 1858 to advocate a systematic return to
Kant […] Especially after 1848, Herbartians at Vienna and Prague persecuted
followers of Hegel quite shamelessly.” 311


“Herbart owed much of his appeal in Austria to the ease with which his
philosophy could be accommodated by Catholics, for whom his very omissions
became advantages. In taking a neutral view of theology, he was not self-
consciously Protestant like Kant, Schelling, or Hegel, and his lack of a
progressivist philosophy of history also seemed a merit. On the positive side,
by steering a middle course between idealism and empiricism, he appeared to
parallel the via media of Aquinas. In addition, Herbart's reworking of
concepts through reclassification matched the practice of Catholic apologists.
The German realist analyzed the gamut of philosophical options with the
detachment of an apologetic theologian appraising his tools. Finally,
Herbart's concept of realia renewed the Leibnizian belief that the universe
consists in hierarchies of indestructible monads, culminating in God as the
reale realissimum. It was above all Herbart's affinity with Leibniz which made
him appeal to disciples of Bolzano.” 310


“Herbart shared with Goethe and Hegel antipathy toward revolution. Perhaps
because his pedagogy had abetted Prussian reform, it tended to train docile,
law-abiding citizens who relished work while despising unrest. By affirming a
static world view, Herbart's pedagogy buttressed semifeudal Austrian society
that dreaded change. After 1848, Herbartians supplanted priest- and police-
ridden education by inculcating moral and intellectual discipline while
minimizing political or theological bias. Steering between the Scylla of
Romanticism and the Charybdis of clericalism, Herbart distilled the best in
Weimar classicism. Herbart's most celebrated followers in Austria were
reformers of education. The reform of gymnasien and universities was organized
in the early 1850's by two disciples of Bolzano, Count Leo Thun and Franz
Exner, as well as by the Thuringian classical philologist Hermann Bonitz
(1814-1888). All these men embraced Herbart's philosophy as a stalking horse
for convictions derived from Bolzano. After 1850 the University of Prague
became a stronghold of Herbartian thought. Three Bohemian-born psychologists
at Prague, Frantisek Cupr (1821-1882), Wilhelm Fridolin Volkmann (1822-1877),
and Gustav Adolf Lindner (1828-1887), who was a student of Franz Exner, wrote
textbooks on empirical psychology, which were used throughout Austria. Freud
studied Lindner's textbook during his final year at gymnasium.” 309f