“In aesthetics Herbart taught thoroughgoing formalism: beauty consists in
formal relations between parts of an object. Interrelations of parts awaken
pleasing or displeasing presentations, irrespective of content. Herbart
opposed Hegel's view that beauty entails harmony between form and content. As
we have seen, Hanslick exploited Herbart's formalism to belittle program
music. […] Ratios between harmonious sounds constitute realia that mirror
workings of the mind. For Herbart, harmony objectifies interplay of
presentations. [...] Herbart won renown above all for a pedagogy that
generalized principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). Inspired by
this Swiss disciple of Rousseau, Herbart disseminated the ideals of Goethe's
humanism under the guise of a psychology of learning. […] Like Goethe and
Schiller, he based ethics as well as pedagogy on self-fulfillment. Morality
consists in the experience of freedom guided by duty, a condition made
possible by a welltrained conscience. Will must be trained to desire what is
good. Toward this end, Herbart sought to instill two formal ideas. First, a
pupil is taught to heed the idea of inner freedom, which urges him to act in
accordance with his conscience. Second, the idea of the efficiency of the will
develops a will that is strong, concentrated, and consistent with the ethical
order of the world. This ethical order Herbart defined according to three
concrete ideas. First, the idea of benevolence requires that each person
desire the good for others as if for himself; second, the idea of justice aims
to prevent strife by awakening a person's natural displeasure at contention;
and third, the idea of equity seeks to redress relations among wills that have
been altered for good or bad.” 309


“The philosopher who was most widely taught in Austria between 1820 and 1880
never set foot in that country. He was the German realist, Johann Friedrich
Herbart (1776-1841), admired by Reform Catholics and secular pedagogues alike.
Born in Lower Saxony, this Protestant studied under Fichte at Jena before
working from 1797 to 1800 as a family tutor in Bern, where he met Pestalozzi.
After serving from 1802 to 1809 as professor of philosophy at Gottingen, he
organized a seminar for gymnasium teachers at Königsberg, where he endeavored
from 1809 to 1832 to train teachers to participate in Wilhelm von Humboldt's
reform of Prussian education. He returned thereafter to his chair at
Göttingen. [...] He espoused moderate realism, opposing the speculative
idealism of his teacher Fichte as well as that of Schelling. Herbart divided
philosophy into four parts: logic, metaphysics, psychology, and practical
sciences. Metaphysics examines the origin of ideas, while psychology
demonstrates how they are developed and combined. […] Herbart differed from
Leibniz in that he held with Kant that we cannot know the essential qualities
of realia. Yet we can, pace Kant, know beyond all doubt the fact of their
existence, which we deduce from the aggregate realia presented to us in
consciousness. The categories of space, time, motion, and unity derive from
such aggregate realia. Herbart rejected both Descartes' innate ideas and
Kant's concepts a priori.” 307


“Bohemians rejected Kant for having exempted morals from control by theology.
They welcomed Herder's concept of historical evolution not only because it
foretold Slavic renaissance but also because it prompted change within the
Catholic church. The most enduring monument of Bohemian humanism was the
reform of Austrian education executed during the 1850's by Bolzano's friend
Count Leo Thun. Sweeping away the confessional bias of Metternich's era, this
devout Catholic introduced humanistic and scientific training into both
secondary schools and university. On the Leibnizian premise that religion and
science cannot contradict each other, Thun ventured to teach students how to
think for themselves, thereby giving rebirth to Austrian scholarship. [...]
Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), born in Southern Bohemia, fused values of reform
Catholicism with those of Goethe. […] Stifter's conviction that Christian love
provides the sole basis of social good recalls Bolzano's ethic. For these
Bohemian contemplatives, education must touch heart as well as head, an ideal
that Thun tried to carry out at the Ministry of Education.” 305


“During the first half of the nineteenth century, Bolzano and his fellow
Catholics sponsored a movement of philosophic Josephinism unique to Bohemia.
Their efforts to found schools, to teach rationalistic theology, and to
promote harmony between Czechs and Germans influenced thinkers like Adalbert
Stifter and Anton Gunther, as well as a host of Herbartian philosophers. This
Josephinism also fostered the romantic program of Czech-German cooperation
known as Bohemism. In contrast to Austria proper and to Hungary, under
Metternich Catholicism played a progressive role in Bohemia. Because values of
the Enlightenment flourished inside the church, anticlericalism remained at a
minimum, with the result that religious romanticism could emerge as a fruit of
the Enlightenment instead of as a protest against it. Reform Catholics steered
a middle course, opposing both Ultramontanism and state centralism. Expanding
research by Eugen Lemberg, Christoph Thienen-Adlerflycht has compared the
ideal of Bohemian leaders to that of Justus Moser: local administrators should
make gradual improvements according to "local reason" without having a
blueprint imposed from above. In order to promote a Herderian ideal of slow
evolution, the church led in founding elementary schools, above all in the
northern diocese of Leitmeritz. These schools combined practical training with
humanistic culture so as to avoid a onesided emphasis on theory such as
observers detected at the University of Berlin. Urging students to seek social
reform, Bohemian teachers instilled a desire to participate in politics. The
generation of Czechs whom these schools molded grew up to lead the campaign
for autonomy after 1860.” 304


“For all his brilliance, Bolzano forfeited recognition during his lifetime, as
his disciples were forced to adopt a Herbartian facade. In the 1880's Franz
Brentano—conceivably under the stimulus of Robert Zimmermann—called attention
to Bolzano's logic, arousing the interest of Edmund Husserl, who in turn
stirred that of Melchior Palagyi and Hugo Bergmann. Bolzano's eclipse and
rediscovery bears comparison with that of Gregor Mendel whose discovery about
1860 of the laws of genetics was recognized only in 1900. Bolzano asserted
once and for all the unassailable objectivity of logical propositions. Each
proposition-in-itself enjoys the autonomy of a Leibnizian monad, unaltered by
men's efforts to express it or think it. This notion that there exists a
heaven of ideas, some of which come to be thought by man while others never
enter a human mind, is one of the fundamental achievements of Austrian
philosophy. In asserting the invincible integrity of ideas, safe from all
human meddling, Bolzano forged a most powerful weapon against censorship of
ideas. No human error or policy can unseat the truth or modify its character.
Like an impregnable fortress, propositions-in-themselves subsist through
eternity, consoling thinkers who penetrate their majesty and assuring Bolzano
a monument that has outlasted persecution by his enemies.” 303f


“Bolzano's view of logic had been anticipated most precisely by the Berlin
physicist Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777), who in his Neues Organon (1764)
expounded the a priori character of mathematical truth. It was he who
introduced the term phenomenology (Phanomenologie) to designate the study of
appearances as distinct from the study of terms (Semiotik). Bolzano's lofty,
otherworldly conception of propositions-in-themselves did not prevent him from
taking a lowly view of man's intellectual capacities. In sermons he warned
that the wisest course in theology is to admit that dogma may err because our
finite nature precludes both omniscience and infallibility. In ethics, Bolzano
reflected Leibniz' concern for the good of the whole. Bolzano's ethical maxim
was: Always choose from among the actions possible to you those which, when
all the consequences are weighed, will best promote the good of the whole, no
matter in which parts. In practice, this maxim enjoined quietism as the
likeliest way to avoid injuring the whole through partisan action. As in the
case of his fellow Josephinists Stifter and Grillparzer, Bolzano's zeal for
the good of the whole of society invited resignation toward improving any of
its parts. This reflects Bolzano's postulate that it is good-in-itself to
contemplate truths-in-themselves. To penetrate the architecture of the
universe makes us wiser and better without our needing to change it.” 303


“He was a Platonic realist who taught the intrinsic subsistence (Ansichsein)
of ideal entities. In the Wissenschaftslehre, he distinguished among
presentations-in-themselves (Vorstellungen an sich), propositions-in-
themselves (Sätze an sich), and truths-in-themselves (Wahrheiten an sich).
Each of these entities an sich exists independently of any mind. Presentations
Bolzano defined as elements out of which propositions are built, and a truth
is simply a true proposition.” 302


“Bolzano was blamed for unrest that had arisen in the Seminary at Leitmeritz,
where one of his students, Michael Josef Fesl (1788-1863), was teaching.
Although an effort to convict Bolzano of heresy resulted in acquittal in
December, 1825, he never again held a teaching position. For ten years after
his dismissal, Bolzano dwelt with his brother Johann at Prague. After the
death of his mother in 1821, the philosopher-priest spent summers from 1824 to
1830 on the estate of a benefactress, Lady Joseph Hoffmann, at Tiechobus,
south of Prague. From 1830 to 1841, he lived there year-round, cared for by
Lady Hoffmann, and upon her death from cancer in 1842, he returned to his
brother's quarters at Prague. Although Bolzano remained under constant police
surveillance, he completed between 1820 and 1830 his master work in four
volumes, the Wissenschaftslehre. After years of effort, he succeeded in having
it published during 1837 at Sulzbach in Bavaria” 301


“Leibniz in turn found followers in Bolzano, Herbart, and their disciples, who
invoked Leibniz in order to refute Kant and his successors. The most able
exponent of Leibnizian philosophy was Bohemian-born Bernard Bolzano
(1781-1848), a logician and theologian of exceptional originality. Not only
did he help to renew Leibniz around 1820, but when his works were rediscovered
after 1880, these encouraged Husserl to espouse antipsychologism. Bolzano was
the son of an Italian art dealer from Lake Como and a German mother from
Prague, a woman of rare piety. He grew up in the Josephinist atmosphere of
Prague, where a lay Catholic professor of philosophy, Karl Heinrich Seibt
(1735-1806), had introduced writers of the German Enlightenment like
Gottsched, Gellert, Baumgarten, and Wolff. At the Piaristengymnasium, Bolzano
had encountered these rationalists even before Seibt's lectures at the
university drew his attention to Kant. There he spent more than a year
mastering Kant's Critiques, at the same time developing skill at mathematics.”
300f


“The progenitor of philosophy in Austria, and especially in Bohemia, was the
Saxon Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who spent two years in Vienna
from 1712 to 1714 as a favorite of Prince Eugene. It was there that he wrote
his Monadologie and Principes de la nature et de la grace (1718). Alternately
a mathematician, physicist, historian, engineer, and philosopher, this
universal man approached controversy in a conciliatory spirit: "I have found
that most sects are right in a good part of what they affirm, but not so much
in what they deny." After 1800 Leibniz' encyclopedic interests, his concern
for the good of the whole, and his ecumenical spirit were rejuvenated in
Bohemian Reform Catholicism.” 300


“The gnosticism of Prague contrasted with the this-worldly involvement of
Hungarian intellectuals and the aestheticism of Vienna. […] Marcionism
expressed the desperation of a beleaguered minority that yearned to silence
its tormentor.” 299


“Although neither Germans nor Czechs approved the status quo, Germans dreaded
the future, fearing that Czechs would overwhelm them. German intellectuals
began to project racial strife onto the cosmos, envisioning a civil war fought
in heaven between a beneficent and a malevolent god. Poets and philosophers
refurbished Gnostic cosmology, as if to concede that only an apocalypse could
reverse the tide that was running against them. The gnosis that flourished at
Prague between 1890 and 1930 resembled a Christian heresy known as Marcionism.
Preaching in Anatolia and Rome, Marcion (ca. 85-ca. 155) had taught that the
Creator God of the Jews was an evil demiurge, whose Creation had trapped men
until Christ came to deliver them. […] The cosmic dualism of Marcion was
formulated into a full-blown cosmology by Christian von Ehrenfels, who taught
at Prague from 1895 to 1929. Gnostic critiques of Providence rejected
Leibnizian faith in harmony between God and his creation, which had sustained
Bohemia up to and after 1850. As we shall see, the Leibnizian theodicy of
Bolzano and Herbart so pervaded Bohemia that its collapse after 1860
engendered not indifference but antinomianism, turning gradually into
gnosticism.” 296


“Bohemian Germans showed their political frustration not only in joining the
German-National movement of Georg von Schönerer, but in a schismatic Socialist
group—the German Workers' party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei )—which in 1904 split
off from Czech Socialists. After 1918 it called itself the German National
Socialist Workers party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei or
DNSAP). In 1902 a Moravian-born publicist, Franz Jesser (1869-1949), coined
the term "Sudeten German" to designate Germans of Bohemia, Moravia, and
Austrian Silesia; through this label he hoped to bolster their opposition to
Czech insurgence.” 294


“Separation of the two faculties caused financial hardship for professors in
the German branch because the majority of students attended the Czech
university. In 1898 celebration of the university's 550th anniversary
foundered in rioting between Czech and German students. […] After about 1880,
the Germans of Prague refused to master Czech, preferring to speak pidgin
Czech (Kuchelböhmisch), in which badly pronounced words were fitted into
German syntax. Arnold Pick, director of the provincial insane asylum in Prague
during the 1880's, had difficulty finding assistants who could speak
sufficient Czech to interview patients. […] In 1897 antipathy mounted thanks
to language ordinances that Count Badeni had proposed. These measures, which
would have required all officials in Bohemia to become bilingual, favored the
Czechs, who alone had bothered to learn both languages. […] Willy Haas stated
that officials spoke a "completely denaturalized, sterile, and grotesque
k.u.k. Czech-German," while nobles spoke French and servants Czech.” 293


“A gigantic celebration accompanied the laying of the cornerstone for a Czech
National Theater at Prague in 1868. Financed by nationwide subscription, the
building opened in 1881, only to be burned to the ground two months later
through a roofer's carelessness. Although some Germans contributed toward the
rebuilding. Young Czechs never forgave what they mistakenly regarded as an act
of sabotage.” 292


“Within the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, the conflict of nationalities
raged most intensely in Bohemia. It was here that demand for federal
government grew strongest. The Czechs had supported the abortive October
Diploma of 1860, which would have established federalism on a feudal basis,
and in 1871 they almost received federal autonomy under a plan proposed by
Heinrich Clam-Martinic (1826-1887) and supported by Prime Minister Karl
Hohenwart (1824-1899). Most of the authority of the central parliament, the
Reichsrat, would have been delegated to local diets. At the last minute the
Hohenwart proposal failed when German nationals and Hungarian leaders united
against it. After Hohenwart's resignation had sealed the marriage of
convenience between German and Magyar, the Czechs continued until 1879 to
boycott the Reichsrat, a protest they had begun in 1863. During the 1870s the
Liberal Auersperg Ministry subjected Prague to military government, as
Statthalter General Alexander von Koller (1813-1890) tried Czech journalists
before German juries and restricted public meetings. Under the premiership of
Count Eduard Taaffe (1833-1895), Czechs received palliatives in return for
supporting the government in the Reichsrat. A Czech university was opened at
Prague in 1882, Czech gymnasien were established, and Czech administrative
posts became available. In 1890 when Taaffe proposed dividing Bohemia into
Czech and German regions, the Young Czechs balked, insisting on control of the
whole.” 291f


“Between 1848 and 1918 two historic processes collided in the Habsburg Empire.
One was the transition from an agrarian to industrial economy, spearheaded by
Bohemia, Vienna, and Budapest. The other was the awakening of subject peoples
(Bedientenvolker) to demand a voice in affairs.” 291


Czechs


“He argued that under capitalism struggle for survival goads children to
overcompensate in order to compete. In a similar way, Marxists exploit
overcompensation in order to exhort revolutionaries to surmount the
powerlessness they feel before possessing classes. Himself a bourgeois, Adler
hailed Malthus' notion that the niggardliness of nature obliges men to
overcome shortages through toil. Under the rubric of social interest, this
psychoanalyst praised the goal of Gemeinschaft solidarity, which both
Christian Socialists and Marxists were seeking. Adler distrusted feminism,
however, denouncing what he called masculine protest in certain women, who
compensate for feeling inferior to men by becoming viragoes. Adler was
quintessentially Viennese. Offspring of urbanized culture, he acknowledged the
ubiquity of conflict, while striving to fuse individualism with socialism.
Although far more political than Freud, Adler was by comparison a philistine;
his psychology of creativity seems puerile next to that of Freud or Rank.
Adler excelled, nevertheless, at elucidating adult life under capitalism.
Repudiating therapeutic nihilism, he injected into psychoanalysis a zeal for
curing.” 283


“Adler was the only member of Freud's early circle to join the Social
Democratic party. In March, 1909, he expounded, under influence of his friend
Leon Trotsky, what was probably the earliest synthesis of Marx with Freud.
Contending that Marx had recognized the primacy of instinct, Adler insisted
that this precursor of Freud had taught the proletariat to detect defense
mechanisms of the bourgeoisie. Adler greeted the Austrian Republic as an
opportunity to promote psychic hygiene. Otto Glockel (1874-1935), director of
Vienna's schools, urged Adler to found child-guidance clinics in elementary
schools as well as to instruct teachers in child psychiatry. The Moravian-born
Jewish anatomist, Julius Tandler (1869-1936), who labored to dispel what
remained of therapeutic nihilism in medicine, backed the program as
commissioner of health for Vienna. Relinquishing further service to Socialist
Vienna, by 1932 Adler sought wider renown by transferring his career to Great
Britain and the United States. He died in 1937 at Glasgow while on a lecture
tour. Buoyancy and fierce temper marked this self-made man, who felt no shame
in manipulating Protektion or in relishing its fruits. In place of Freud's
preoccupation with a patient's past, Adler substituted a future-oriented
environment psychology. Life-style crystallizes around a person's goals, which
seek to compensate childhood defects.” 283


“The most renowned Freudian dissidents were a Swiss pastor's son, Carl Gustav
Jung (1875-1961), and a Viennese Jew, Alfred Adler (1870-1937). Jung revived
Romantic nature-philosophy, while Adler synthesized Nietzsche, Darwin, and
socialism to produce the most bourgeois of all schools of psychoanalysis.” 281


“No feature of Freud's career has been so widely deplored as his suppression
of dissent. Visitors to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society complained that
orthodoxy was enforced in an atmosphere of almost religious exaltation.” 278


“When Kraus declared that "Psychoanalysis is the mental illness for which it
claims to be a cure," he could have been unmasking any ideology; his stricture
applies more aptly to fascism or Leninism than to even the most doctrinaire
psychoanalyst. Joining countless others, Kraus censured the notion of an
unconscious for sanctioning irrational impulses; According to the latest
research, the subconscious appears to be a kind of ghetto for thoughts. Today
many people feel homesick. He ridiculed any psychology that anatomizes the
lightning-quick processes of thought: "Psychology is an auto-bus which
accompanies an air-plane." With more venom than insight, Kraus belittled what
he could not understand, incensed that anyone should seek to alleviate
insanity. A no less flamboyant anti-Freudian was Friedell, who berated Freud
for bolstering irrationalism with tools of rationalism.” 277


“At Vienna Freud provoked relentless opposition in Kraus, Friedell, and the
Catholic anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt” 276


“The fact that nine-tenths of his adherents were Jews intensified separatism,
inviting rumors that Freud ran another Jewish outfit like the Social
Democratic party or Zionism. Whatever else may have isolated Freud in Vienna,
it was not his scrutiny of sex. In a city where Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing,
and Weininger were read with nonchalance, Freud's pansexualism hardly shocked
anyone. Rather he crystallized a preoccupation with sex which several
disparate movements had awakened. Birth control, campaigns against venereal
disease, study of sexual symbolism in folklore, emancipation of women, and
critique of hypocritical morality had exposed the centrality of sex. What
irked other psychotherapists was Freud's insistence that neurosis has a
psychic rather than a physical etiology. In place of electrotherapy and warm
baths, Freud listened to patients hours on end, probing confessions to learn
how and when symptoms had commenced. By affirming that long hours of talk
could unravel most hysteria, Freud combatted the therapeutic nihilism that had
plagued Viennese psychiatry. Among physicians who venerated postmortem
examinations and deemed surgery the surest cure, Freud's faith in talk
rankled. He felt more at home with writers and archaeologists, who at least
were fellow artists in words. Freud's exclusiveness had the disadvantage of
severing adherents from contact with other Viennese schools. Heinz Hartmann
(1894-1970) was the only Freudian to frequent the Vienna Circle, as Ernst Kris
did with the Vienna School of Art History. Although during the 1920's Alfred
Adler collaborated with Austro-Marxists, he had long since renounced Freud.
The founder of psychoanalysis deprecated cross-fertilizing psychology with
philosophy, as Brentano and Mach had urged a generation before.” 275f


“He expected psychoanalysis to fare better in Hungary, Germany, and Great
Britain than in Austria. After 1896, he eschewed academic medicine, teaching
two hours per week while working eighteen hours a day on his own concerns.”
275


“Although it seems more plausible to say that Freud was intensely Austro-
Hungarian than that he was intensely Jewish, he did affiliate with certain
Jewish values. Around 1910, he warned Max Graf not to deny his son the
benefits of Jewish education: If you do not let your son grow up a Jew, you
will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by
anything else. Like many other assimilated Jews, Freud cherished his heritage
as a spur to creativity. Speaking in May, 1926, before the B'nai B'rith lodge
of Vienna, where since the 1890's he had attended semimonthly meetings, Freud
extolled Judaism for liberating him from prejudice and for teaching him to
persevere. Although he disparaged Jewish mysticism and worship, Freud prized
Jewish jokes, especially those featuring puns” 272


“Besides personages from Greek mythology, Freud glorified giants from the
Jewish past. At gymnasium he had respected the Semitic leader Hannibal who
outwitted the Roman legions, seeing in him a precursor of the Jewish ministers
in Auersperg's cabinet whom his father told him to emulate.” 271


By making promiscuity its own punishment, syphilis strangled Renaissance
sensualism, imbuing the Counter-Reformation with a revitalized sense of sin.
This thesis had been advanced in more scabrous form by an arch-anticlerical,
Oskar Panizza (1853-1921) [...] Like many anticlericals, Freud venerated Greek
and Roman antiquity. Trips to Rome in 1901 and to Athens in 1904 fulfilled
deeply felt childhood wishes." 270


“Many scholars have contended that Freud—his anticlericalism
notwithstanding—was profoundly religious. Although Freud regarded himself as
religiously unmusical, Fritz Wittels and David Bakan among others have argued
that his zeal bordered on the mystical. To be sure, at least until 1914, Freud
believed in an invisible order underlying the chaos of emotion, postulating
that exposure of latent conflicts would disperse them. Although this faith may
have been engendered by study of Herbartian philosophy at gymnasium, it seems
more probable—given Freud's aversion to philosophy—that his world view
crystallized in Briicke's laboratory. Freud held the faith of a positivist,
tinctured with the skeptical open-mindedness of impressionism. By age ten, he
had shed whatever vestiges of supernatural belief he might have acquired as a
child. Throughout his life, he despised the Catholic church for nurturing
forces which stifled him: Schlamperei, Protektion, anti-Semitism, and
hostility to innovation. His favorite reading included Don Quixote, Paradise
Lost, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy, works that portray conflict between
Christian asceticism and pagan license. In November, 1907, Freud endorsed a
hypothesis advanced by Fritz Wittels that the Roman Catholic church could
undergo renewal during the sixteenth century chiefly because syphilis had
reimposed an ethic of sexual continence. Freud sharpened his ethical
anticlericalism' with the acid of medical training, affirming: the Catholic
Church was at the brink of dissolution at the time of the Renaissance; it was
saved by two factors: syphilis and Luther.” 269f


“Although Austria did not necessarily produce more neurotics than elsewhere,
it fostered conditions that helped Freud to uncover the mechanism of neurosis.
A public life veiled in dissimulation paralleled the repression that Freud
discerned in individuals. In his schema of neurosis we see Habsburg society
writ small. Court preciosity found an equivalent in every bourgeois household,
where girls were so sheltered from the facts of sexuality that many marriages
foundered in frigidity. In sex-starved young women, neuroses were commonplace:
Schnitzler and Bahr portrayed their discomfiture, while Mayreder and Ehrenfels
decried it. [...] Freud confessed to Max Eastman in 1926, "Politically I am
just nothing." He did not register to vote at Vienna until 1908, and he
accepted World War One with resignation. An arch-privatist, he despaired of
changing social or political conditions, incarnating that withdrawal into the
arts and sciences which had sustained Vienna” 266


“In Vienna everyone exemplified what in 1895 Freud ascribed to hysterics: they
suffer largely from reminiscences. In this citadel of memory, Freud exploited
Breuer's discovery that reliving a trauma could dispel its symptoms.” 265


“The Catholic tradition of charity, which Klemens Maria Hofbauer had revived,
was engulfed by the positivism of postmortem examiners. Sympathy for the
little man, was not, until after 1900, a consideration of the Medical Faculty.
At the General Hospital, the impartiality of Josephinist bureaucracy became
impartiality toward death: not even the rich could obtain competent nurses.
Disease comprised part of life: the task of doctors was not to eradicate it
but merely to understand it. Refusal by nineteenth-century physicians to
intervene in natural processes paralleled the reluctance of many Austrians to
participate in politics. Likewise the preference of Carl Menger and Ludwig von
Mises for an unimpeded market economy seemed to corroborate the medical
dictum, "The essential is to do no harm" (Primum est non nocere).” 254f


“The poor dreaded entering the hospital, fearing that they would never leave.
In a custom still prevalent, patients had to pay in advance. Incoming patients
were examined in droves, and every patient who died underwent autopsy. In
1898, C. O'Conor-Eccles recounted the following vignette: A doctor who visited
the hospital told me he saw a party of students sounding a woman who was dying
of pleurisy or pneumonia, in order that they might each hear the crepitation
in her lungs as her last moments approached. She expired before they left the
ward. He said something about treatment in another case to the professor who
was lecturing these young men. The reply was, "Treatment, treatment, that is
nothing; it is the diagnosis that we want."” 254


“In the field of ophthalmology, a Bohemian, Ferdinand von Arlt (1812-1887),
discovered the cause of nearsightedness, and in 1854 a Vienna-born eye surgeon
Eduard Jäger von Jaxtthal (1818-1884) introduced eye charts to standardize
prescriptions for eyeglasses. The preponderance of Bohemians among these
pioneers demonstrates further the excellence of education available during
Bohemia's Catholic Enlightenment. Whereas in Vienna, religion had been
separated from natural science, in Bohemia the two were pursued in tandem,
helping to groom such giants of the Vienna Medical School as Rokitansky,
Skoda, Oppolzer, Hebra, Dittel, and Arlt. The Bohemian origin of its
luminaries notwithstanding, Vienna reigned as medical capital of the Habsburg
Empire, becoming in the phrase of Rudolf Virchow, the Mecca of Medicine.” 253


“Bohemian-born Johann von Oppolzer (1808-1871) excelled at diagnostics,
inspiring such pupils as Freud's friends Josef Breuer and Rudolf Chrobak.
Brünn-born Ferdinand von Hebra (1816-1880), a companion of Semmelweis,
systematized dermatology, classifying diseases and devising water-bed therapy.
Another Moravian, Leopold von Dittel (1815-1898) founded modern urology. The
man who did most to counteract therapeutic nihilism was a Prussian, Hermann
Nothnagel (1841-1905), who as a professor at Vienna from 1882 to 1905
perfected use of blood pressure in diagnosis. He was beloved for willingness
to visit patients. Perhaps the most celebrated of Viennese doctors was the
German-born surgeon, Theodor Billroth (1829-1894), an amateur musician whose
friends included Brahms and Hanslick. Having invented an anaesthesia of ether
and chloroform, Billroth pioneered such operations as resectioning the stomach
and removing the larynx. Billroth reflected the predilection of Viennese
physicians for treatment by surgery. Reliance on excising a diseased part
accorded with stress on pathological anatomy and skepticism toward drugs.”
252f


“Vienna's most notorious case of therapeutic nihilism concerned the Budapest-
born obstetrician Ignac Semmelweis (1818-1865). At the General Hospital in
1847, he discovered that childbed fever resulted when doctors coming directly
from the dissecting room introduced bacteria into a mother's womb. Although by
compelling doctors to rinse their hands in chloride of lime before touching
patients, Semmelweis reduced mortality sharply, the leader of his clinic,
Johann Klein (1788-1856), remained unimpressed. Despite support from
Rokitansky and Skoda, Semmelweis was demoted in 1848, allegedly for
sympathizing with the revolution. Inasmuch as he was not, as is sometimes
claimed, Jewish, it seems that he fell victim not to anti-Semitism, but to
therapeutic nihilism, whose adherents deemed his concern for the patient
unbecoming to a professional. In Budapest from 1849 to 1865, he spoiled his
career by assailing distinguished physicians who refused to adopt prophylaxis.
[…] Once Lister had introduced carbolic acid in 1865, antisepsis spread
rapidly, being introduced into Austria by a Bohemian-born surgeon and poet,
Eduard Albert (1841-1900).” 252


“Rokitansky's indifference to therapy echoed the theory of human nature, which
he expounded in Die Solidarität alles Thierlebens (Vienna, 1869). Protoplasm
at every level of existence is hungry, said Rokitansky, necessitating each
organism to be aggressive so as to stamp out rivals. Because of the
aggressiveness of the protoplasm in him, man cannot help resorting to lies,
deceit, and duplicity, failings that only the state can curb. Individuals are
doomed to wage a Darwinian struggle for freedom, a contest that guarantees
progress in science while inflicting much suffering. Rokitansky's debt to
Bohemian Reform Catholicism was obvious when he asserted that only sympathy
between men can overcome the suffering inherent in life. Preaching a
Biedermeier faith in harmony between man and God, the anatomist urged men to
imitate Christ's model of enduring pain. Hobbesian and Leibnizian at once,
Rokitansky interpreted Darwin's struggle for existence as evidence that
harmony pervades the universe. It was owing to sublime faith in the order of
nature that this Bohemian could endorse expectant therapy to the exclusion of
pharmacology. However much Rokitansky and Skoda may have countenanced
therapeutic nihilism, it was some of their students, especially Joseph Dietl
(1804-1878), who distorted skepticism toward nostrums into the doctrine that
to do nothing must be the best treatment. Whereas earlier physicians had
indiscriminately prescribed leeches and old-wives' potions without making a
diagnosis, Rokitansky and Skoda insisted that diagnosis come first.
Therapeutic nihilism was reinforced by Rokitansky's lack of success as a
surgeon as well as by his students' exposure in the dissecting room to organs
so misshapen as to preclude hope either of prevention or cure. A Heidelberg-
trained therapist, Adolf Kussmaul (1822-1902), who later played a role in
coining the name "Biedermeier," was so horrified by the indifference of
teachers to patients that in 1847 he wrote a poem satirizing Viennese
professors for allowing a patient to die while they debated the diagnosis. At
least one Vienna-born physician, Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806-1849), labored
in vain to stem overspecialization in medicine by reviving the ancient art of
healing. In Zur Diätetik der Seele (Vienna, 1838) this disciple of Kant and
Goethe pleaded for self-healing through self-mastery.” 251f


“Their quest for empirical truth represented a positivist backlash against
romantic medicine. The combative Rokitansky disdained the role of a self-
effacing scientist. As a member of the Herrenhaus, he led the fight to have
compulsory teaching of Catholic religion removed from the schools” 251


“Johann Peter Frank […] In his six-volume treatise, System einer vollstandigen
medizinischen Polizei (Mannheim, Tubingen, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1779-1819),
Frank founded the science of public health, "Medical police" would constitute
a branch of cameralistic public law, designed to regulate life from birth to
death. The Josephinist bureaucracy would promote births and safeguard health
with a view to enhancing the nation's prosperity. [...] By 1850 skepticism
toward traditional therapy had so taken root that the only medicament used in
the General Hospital was cherry brandy. For fear of distorting symptoms,
doctors refused to prescribe any remedies. This attitude reached a peak of
intensity under Königgrätz-born anatomist Carl von Rokitansky (1804-1878). As
a professor at Vienna from 1844, Rokitansky reportedly performed more than
85,000 autopsies, forging pathological anatomy into the first reliable tool of
diagnosis to supplant Hippocrates' doctrine of signs (semiotics). Pilsen-born
Josef Skoda (1805-1881), an uncle of the arms manufacturer Emil von Skoda,
codified results of Rokitansky's postmortem examinations so as to found modern
diagnostics. He revived the now ubiquitous method of chest percussion which a
forgotten Graz-born physician, Leopold von Auenbrugger (1722-1809) had devised
at Vienna in 1761. Sharing the limelight with Rokitansky and Skoda was Josef
Hyrtl (1810-1894), who as a professor at Vienna from 1845 perfected the
techniques of anatomy; his laboratory shipped specimens throughout the world.”
250


“Otto Weininger, Richard Wahle, Karl Kraus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein embodied
the conviction that diseases of society or language defy curing. Outspoken
opponents of this refusal to propose solutions included Bertha von Suttner,
Rosa Mayreder, Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Theodor Herzl, and Otto Neurath. [...]
Van Swieten's followers revived Hippocrates' doctrine of the healing power of
nature in order to diminish the frequency of blood letting. A Dutch
obstetrician Johann Lukas Boer (1751-1835), whom Joseph II brought to Vienna
in 1780, discarded use of artificial aids during childbirth. Coining the
slogan, "We should never manage as if nature had given up her work of
parturition," he advocated so-called expectant therapy. His procedure of
waiting for nature to effect recovery became standard at the General Hospital”
249


“Freud entered the Medical Faculty at Vienna, having been wooed from a career
of law by hearing Goethe's fragment "Die Natur" (1783) […] Although in 1902 he
became an extraordinary professor at the Medical School, he propagated his
school of psychotherapy entirely outside the university. Ever eager to
vindicate his brainchild, Freud consulted with patients for as long as twelve
hours a day; then he sat writing until as late as three o'clock in the
morning. […] In 1909 Freud visited the United States to lecture at Clark
University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he garnered an unfavorable
impression of America.” 248


“He keenly regretted that defects of language make metaphysics impossible.
Shunning the desperation of Wahle and displaying greater finesse than Stöhr,
he argued that although conventional philosophy has played itself out, much
remains for commentators to unscramble. Through illustrations and aphorisms
worthy of Kraus, Wittgenstein disentangled Western philosophy. By espousing
the highest standard of rigor, he discerned Schlamperei in other thinkers'
coherence, just as Kraus detected turpitude where others saw merely dalliance.
Moral energy, which transplanted his father's dynamism to the world of ideas,
made Ludwig Wittgenstein a luminary of twentieth-century thought, who brought
to England a campaign that certain Viennese were waging against laxity. Bold
and incorruptible, he cultivated a perfectionism that in other Austrian
thinkers too often became either therapeutic nihilism or utopianism.” 239


“By asserting that language cannot altogether purge itself of mental cramps,
Wittgenstein appeared a therapeutic nihilist in the manner of his mentor
Schopenhauer. Yet this Austrian lacked the pervasive pessimism of a Vienna-
born Jewish follower, Friedrich Waismann (1896-1959), who in the words of
Stuart Hampshire indulged: A luxuriance in pessimism and passivity, and in the
ineffectiveness of reason; a wry sentimentality, a cultivation of mystery, and
the sense of belonging to a dying elite, who congratulated themselves on their
philosophy, which they know will not save them from being swept away by the
violence that is to come. […] While at Cambridge, Wittgenstein bewailed the
lack of genuine puzzlement which plagued British teachers of philosophy. So
certain was Wittgenstein that philosophy precludes improvement that he sought
to dissuade students from pursuing it as a career. Averse to professional
philosophers, he preferred to read cowboy stories and to quote remarks by his
chambermaid. Not one to browse widely, Wittgenstein read beloved works over
and over […] Although Wittgenstein agreed with Freud that art triggers wish-
fulfillment, he pronounced the founder of psychoanalysis, whom he first read
in 1919, to be more clever than wise.” 238


“In January, 1929, Wittgenstein accepted an invitation from Bertrand Russell
and G. E. Moore to take a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1935,
the emigre visited the Soviet Union, soon renouncing plans to settle there;
instead he withdrew for almost a year to his hut in Norway. In 1937
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, succeeding two years later to Moore's
chair, while residing at Trinity College. During World War Two the Tolstoyan
impulse spurred Wittgenstein to serve as a hospital orderly in London and
later as a medical technician at Newcastle. After the war, he interrupted
teaching from 1947 to 1949 to sojourn in Ireland. At Trinity College,
Wittgenstein inspired a legend. Uncouth attire, a cluttered room, delight in
cowboy stories, and a habit of discussing philosophy with the chambermaid set
this bachelor apart. Although he declined to publish, he attracted a coterie
of disciples, who since his death in April, 1951, have made his influence
paramount in British academic philosophy.” 235f


“Having donated the residue of his fortune in keeping with Tolstoy's self-
effacing Christianity, from 1920 to 1926 Wittgenstein labored as an elementary
schoolteacher in Lower Austria, working two years each at Trattenbach,
Puchberg-am-Schneeberg, and Otterthal. To facilitate teaching, he prepared a
Worterbuch fiir Volksschulen (Vienna, 1926), which the Ministry of Education
sanctioned for classroom use. […] During the summer of 1920 the budding
teacher toiled as a gardener at Klosterneuburg, and six years later he served
as gardener's assistant to monks at Hütteldorf near Vienna. From 1926 to late
1928, he dwelt at Vienna, designing a house at Kundmanngasse 19 for his sister
Mrs. Margarethe Stonborough.” 235


“Early in life Wittgenstein repudiated the meliorism of his entrepreneur
father, insisting in the words of Nestroy that "Progress is characterized by
the fact that it appears much greater than it really is." Those who hail
Wittgenstein for having inaugurated a giant advance in philosophy forget how
persistently he belittled such claims. […] As a boy, Wittgenstein had been
fascinated by machinery, fabricating a sewing machine and nurturing hopes of
studying physics under Boltzmann, only to have these plans crushed by the
latter's suicide. After two years in Berlin, from 1908 to 1911 he studied
aeronautics at Manchester, experimenting with kite-flying and with jet
propulsion. In January, 1912, Wittgenstein entered Cambridge to study under
Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. There he stayed until mid-1913, declining in
January, 1913, to return to Vienna for his father's funeral. That summer he
visited Norway with his friend David Pinsent, to whom the Tractatus is
dedicated. In October, 1913, Wittgenstein settled alone on a fjord at
Skjolden, northeast of Bergen, where he began chronicling the thoughts that
comprise the Tractatus. Having earlier esteemed writings by Weininger and
Kraus, the hermit arranged to have Die Fackel dispatched to his hideaway in
Norway. In 1914 Wittgenstein followed advice from Kraus as to how best he
might divest himself of the fortune that he had just inherited. Kraus
recommended that the editor of Der Brenner, Ludwig Ficker (1880-1967), be
appointed to distribute a sum of 100,000 crowns among deserving contributors
to that journal. During July, 1914, the twenty-five-year-old Maecenas wrote to
Ficker, who selected Rilke and Georg Trakl to receive 20,000 crowns each. News
of this windfall prompted the drug-ridden Trakl to vomit. Wittgenstein himself
did not fancy expressionist poetry, branding the works of Albert Ehrenstein
"Hundedreck"; he preferred elegies and epigrams by Goethe and Mörike.” 234


“Ludwig Wittgenstein […] worked as an engineer, philosopher, schoolteacher,
gardener, architect, professor of philosophy, and during wartime as a hospital
orderly and laboratory technician. Although while living in England from 1929
to 1951 he refused to publish any of his voluminous writings, subsequently he
has surpassed all other Austrian philosophers of this century in posthumous
fame. Much of this innovator's originality, not to say eccentricity, derived
from his German-born Jewish father, Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913). Having been
expelled from the Akademisches Gymnasium for repeated pranks, at age eighteen,
Karl ran away to New York, returning to Austria two years later. Early he
distinguished himself as an industrial engineer and then as an entrepreneur,
during the 1880's securing for his firms in Bohemia a monopoly on manufacture
of railroad track. As chief of a giant consortium, the elder Wittgenstein
became one of the wealthiest men in Austria, retiring in 1898 to live as a
grand seigneur, entertaining lavishly, and traveling around the world. A man
of charm and perspicacity, Karl Wittgenstein died after years of painful
illness, having seen three sons predecease him. A liberal who wrote on
economics in the Neue Freie Presse, through overpowering energy he instilled
in his children respect for authority, so that his son branded social
revolution as immoral. Ludwig also inherited the musical gifts of his parents,
who counted Brahms among their friends. […] As the youngest of five brothers
and three sisters, Ludwig was educated at home until age fourteen.” 233


“Stöhr classified language-shaped philosophers according to root metaphors,
distinguishing verb philosophies from noun philosophies. […] Stöhr has exerted
so little influence that it is difficult to assess his significance. Although
Mach respected this colleague, an unwieldly terminology and stubborn
independence discredited Stöhr in the eyes of others.” 219


“Even more than Schlick, Stöhr exalted the phenomenon of suffering. On this
foundation he erected a late-Biedermeier social ethics, which he called
biotics. Biotics pursues two paths: its negative task is to teach each
individual to diminish suffering, while its positive function is to promote
enjoyment. More broadly, communal biotics, or ethics, elevates diminution of
suffering into a common goal, while culture is that aspect of communal biotics
in which people share enjoyment. Religion, Stöhr noted, can be both negative
and positive, belonging partly to ethics and partly to culture. Whereas
medicine serves solely to alleviate suffering, the arts belong to both realms;
as a Viennese, Stöhr knew that theater can sooth pain as well as impart
pleasure. Stöhr eschewed therapeutic nihilism, insisting that pain be eased
before enjoyment can thrive. Negative biotics falls into four spheres
according to the source of suffering: pain can spring from nonhuman nature,
man's own nature, fellow men, or superhuman powers. Pathogonous philosophy
aims above all to assuage pain inflicted by superhuman forces such as fate and
accidents of birth. It lacks, however, the disinterested majesty of
theorogonous contemplation.” 218


"Stöhr published his most original insights in his Lehrbuch der Logik in
psychologisierender Darstellung (Leipzig, 1910) and Psychologie (Vienna, 1917;
2d ed., 1922)." ([Johnston 1983:217](zotero://open-
pdf/library/items/GGR6FKY8?page=217))


“Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgart, 1920- 1923) […]
In expounding "mysticism without God" (gottlose Mystik), he insisted that
words like Gott or Gottheit carry no evidence for the existence of any such
entity. Espousing negative theology, Mauthner championed the concept of Tao,
nameless and without properties. It could be replaced, he opined, by the
neutral syllable "das." Influenced by Meister Eckhart, Mauthner elaborated a
critique of language into the staunchest negative theology of the twentieth
century. Substituting Tao for Eckhart's hidden god, Mauthner bordered on the
gnosis of the Moravian mystic Eugen Heinrich Schmitt. Despite affinities with
the Marcionism of Kafka, Mauthner believed that experience can be mastered,
however solipsistically. From within the prison of ego, each individual can
watch life pulse by, while to send signals from one prison to another entails
distortion. To construct these signals into a system of philosophy is sheer
folly. Preaching a therapeutic nihilism worthy of Weininger, Mauthner
advocated the self-immolation of thought. We have already mentioned the
resemblance between Mauthner's injunction to silence and the pronouncement of
Schnitzler that "we do not think in words nor in pictures, but in something
that we cannot grasp." Like Viennese impressionists, Mauthner postulated a
current of emotion underlying a film of words, which by themselves cannot
convey the flux beneath.” 216f


“In Mauthner, awareness of the artificiality of language had arisen during his
youth as a Jew in Bohemia, where he had been taught not one but three
languages as if each had been the idiom of his ancestors: German, Czech, and
Hebrew. Early immersion in three tongues had made him question the reliability
of any of them as an instrument of thought. In contrast to Johannes Urzidil,
Mauthner deplored the "paper German" spoken in Prague: its vaunted purity
cloaked isolation from vivifying dialects. Sharing the revulsion of Rilke at
pidgin-Czech (Kuchelböhmisch) and at the debased Yiddish of Bohemia, Mauthner,
like Bolzano, pleaded in vain for Bohemian Germans to master Czech. Mauthner
had been converted into a German nationalist by seeing Prussian wounded after
Königgrätz. During the mid-1870's, having shed what little remained of Jewish
identity, he exchanged Bohemia's racial strife for the comfort of Bismarck's
empire. Because of his proficiency as a parodist, Mauthner early gained
freedom from the fetish of words. In 1922 he wrote that his concept of word-
superstition (Wortaberglaube) owed its genesis to four influences sustained
during the early 1870's. First, Bismarck's deeds had freed Mauthner from the
word-superstition that paralyzes politics and law. Second, Nietzsche's Vom
Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (Leipzig, 1873) had unmasked
word-superstition in history. Third, diatribes against Schiller by the Saxon
dramatist and Shakespeare-worshiper Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) had liberated
Mauthner from the magic of rhetoric. Fourth, Ernst Mach's monism had
emancipated him from blind acceptance of theory in natural science. Mauthner
regarded his critique of the idols of speech as a culmination both of medieval
nominalism and of British skepticism, especially that of Bacon and Hume.” 215


“Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923) was the first Austrian—and perhaps the first
thinker anywhere—to jettison metaphysics through a merciless analysis of
language.”  214


“museums of history and civics such as Neurath pioneered at Vienna have dotted
the globe, flourishing especially in Eastern Europe where they dispense
propaganda as well as data. In scope of interests, Neurath knew no rival in
this century. Who else conducted original research in physics, mathematics,
logic, economics, sociology, ancient history, political theory, history of
German literature, architecture, and graphics? Among Austrian polymaths not
even Ernst Brücke could match this diversity. Together with Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Neurath worked for world unification, making Vienna during
the 1920's a center for ecumenical enterprises that took wing twenty years
later. Like Herzl, Neurath was a practical utopian who sowed for others to
reap.” 213


“He finished his career at Oxford, editing the Encyclopedia of Unified
Science, promoting isotypes, and designing new buildings for the bombed town
of Bilston. Neurath was a huge, jolly man, known for kindness to friend and
foe alike. He used to sign letters with an isotype of an elephant, drawn to be
either buoyant or depressed as the moment warranted. A persuasive speaker and
tireless organizer, after 1920 Neurath devoted himself to building bridges
between disciplines, classes, and nations. He echoed his father's*ideals when
he wrote: As soon as all men can participate in a common culture and the
canyon between the educated and the uneducated is bridged, life will be more
fully understood and lived.” 212


"Otto Neurath (1882-1945) was one of the neglected geniuses of the twentieth
century. He made innovations in so many fields that even admirers have lost
count of his accomplishments. In no small measure, Neurath owed his
versatility to his father, Wilhelm Neurath (1840- 1901). A Jew born near
Pressburg, the elder Neurath took a doctorate in philosophy at Vienna. After
earning a second doctorate in Staatswissenschaften at Tubingen, he served as a
docent at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna and after 1889 as a professor at
the Hochschule fiir Bodenkultur. Between 1878 and 1901 this Hungarian
intellectual published twenty books analyzing the social problem. Espousing an
ethical idealism similar to that of Friedrich Jodi and Wilhelm Jerusalem, the
elder Neurath glorified work as the activity that elevates man above the
animals. In his Volkswirtschaftliche und sozialphilosophische Essays (Vienna,
1880), he hailed historians both as prophets who pass judgment on the past and
as reformers who benefit from millenia of experience. Imbued with the
crusading zeal of other Hungarian Jews like Hertzka and Nordau, Wilhelm
Neurath preached progressivism to the uneducated, lest proletarians flounder
amid the plethora of modern philosophies. Proclaiming that "Mensch sein,
heisst ein Kämpfer sein' (To be a man is to be a fighter), he embodied
Hungarian activism as a check on Vienna's therapeutic nihilism. Bom at Vienna,
Otto Neurath absorbed his father's encyclopedic learning and reforming zeal.
He studied at Vienna and Heidelberg before taking a doctorate at Berlin in
1906. While studying mathematics there, he edited the little known Faust
(1839) by Ludwig Hermann Wolfram (1807-1852). As a docent at Heidelberg,
Neurath met Max Weber, who influenced his interpretation of ancient economies.
Around 1910 he collaborated with Olga Hahn on papers in mathematical logic,
and as a professor at the Commercial College in Vienna, he examined the impact
of Ruthenes on relations between Russia and Austria-Hungary. In prewar
articles on the economics of warfare, he pioneered graphic methods of
presenting statistics, anticipating his invention of isotypes ten year later.
During World War One, he analyzed wartime economics, while also publishing
essays on the history of optics and on medieval theology. It was
characteristic of Neurath that he urged students to switch careers every five
years. In 1919 as a consultant to the Bavarian government, Neurath urged, a la
Emil Steinbach, that wartime production boards be continued so as to regulate
the economy without expropriation. This scheme Lujo Brentano likened to the
regimentation of Egypt's pharaohs. Neurath persisted in his project even after
Communists had seized power on April 7, 1919. Following their overthrow, he
was arrested as a revolutionary, only to be acquitted on the strength of
testimony by Max Weber and Ernst Niekisch. While awaiting trial, Neurath wrote
Anti-Spengler (Munich, 1921), which upheld progressivism against the German
pessimist. Upon returning to Vienna, Neurath initiated his most influential
project. In 1923 he founded a Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts-und
Wirtschaftsmuseum), located in City Hall and designed to inform the public
about Socialist policies. In order to enliven statistics, Neurath devised
pictographs—he called them isotypes—which personify integers by means of gaily
colored little men, houses, boats, and so forth. Together with his staff,
Neurath generated more than two thousand isotypes, for which he foresaw
unlimited uses. Above all, he desired to apply them to communication between
nations and to instructing the illiterate. 210ff


“Schlick would have shuddered to see how logical positivists belittle earlier
philosophers. By esteeming life above theory, the founder of the Vienna Circle
deviated from most of his colleagues.” 210


Schlick: "Ein Denker, der nur Philosoph ist, kann kein grosser Philosoph
sein. Der ist kein Philosoph, der so handelt, als ob alle Menschen
Philosophen wären. "Im Mann ist mehr Kind als im Jüngling," sagt Nietzsche.
Das erklart die Misere der Flegeljahre. Der Forscher bleibt jung, weil er
ewig Neues sucht." 210


“Throughout Schlick disputed the axiology of Brentano, which postulates
absolute moral values. In equating values with feelings of pleasure, Schlick
defended neoutilitarianism with a subtlety of psychology rare in any
philosopher. People hesitate to acknowledge pleasure as the sole standard of
value, said Schlick, because teachers have indoctrinated them to regard the
word "pleasure" as itself unpleasant. Anticipating the later Karl Mannheim,
Schlick exhorted elementary schools to safeguard social and personal
happiness. In rebuking teachers who make pleasant things reprehensible,
Schlick paralleled antiauthoritarians such as Mayreder and PopperLynkeus. Far
from being a hedonist, Schlick praised pain: in order to experience the
sublimest pleasures, argued Schlick, the soul must first undergo torment.
During pain, hope provides pleasure by dangling the idea of an agreeable
future, prodding us to seek relief. Schlick equated human fulfillment with
ecstasy: joy and sorrow activate man's whole nature into a convulsion through
which "the whole person is affected to a depth which few impressions can
reach." Because this churning of the depths arises more readily from pain than
from enjoyment, aversion to pain stimulates growth more effectively than does
quest for pleasure. In a doctrine almost identical with that of Stöhr, Schlick
contended that the advance of civilization can be gauged by the extent to
which pain has ceased to be indispensable for eliciting pleasure. Schlick
expected that gradually civilization would outgrow reliance on suffering.” 208


“As a philosopher, Boltzmann asserted the arbitrariness of all hypotheses, a
view that startled Newtonian physicists. Rather than retreat into Mach's
phenomenalism, he argued that several contradictory theories may be equally
correct.” 205


“The breadth of Mach's following may be judged from his influence on Russian
Marxism. Alexander Bogdanov (1883-1928) and Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933)
espoused the empirio-criticism of Avenarius and Mach in order to revise Marx's
materialism. Lenin published a celebrated diatribe against their revisionism
in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (St. Petersburg, 1908), a polemic of
which Mach took little note. […] United by little except interest in empirical
psychology, Brentano and Mach between them swept Herbartianism from the field.
Mach went on to subvert all attempts at metaphysics including those of
Brentano. Like his colleague Boltzmann, Mach subordinated philosophy to
physics.” 204


“Husserl was prodded during the 1890's by opposing Mach's psychologism.” 203


“Rejecting altogether Kant's a priori theory of number, Mach argued that our
system of integers had arisen to fill an economic need for simple notation and
rapid calculation. […] Consciousness consists of sensations coming in an
orderly, continuous flow, while memory involves reawakening a previous
constellation of sensations. Although our sensory apparatus necessarily
distorts what it perceives, we lack any means of differentiating impressions
from reality. Abandoning any distinction between reality and appearance, Mach
left man awash in a sea of appearances.” 202


“Mach revered the Enlightenment for having exposed misapplication of concepts
like God, nature, and soul. Against such fictions, Mach invoked as his maxim
the principle of economy enshrined in Occam's razor: the best theory is that
which employs a minimum of variables. […] Hypotheses like that of the ether or
of atomic theory he deprecated as metaphysical constructs that multiplied
entities needlessly. Henri Becquerel's discovery in 1896 of radioactivity came
too late to shake Mach's skepticism about the atom. Similarly, he impugned
Einstein's theory of special relativity, partly on the grounds that it
presupposes the extramental existence of natural laws. Only late in life did
Mach acknowledge that his own rejection of absolute time as an abstraction had
stimulated Einstein. […] He documented his skepticism toward theory by
chronicling the evolution of hypotheses in mechanics, acoustics, optics, and
the theory of heat. Through exposing the blunders of previous researchers,
Mach hoped to show the artificiality of even his own formulations.” 201


“Mach was renowned for a monistic philosophy of science, which came to be
identified with the empirio-criticism of Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) at
Zurich. Although Mach first read Avenarius only in 1883, he later credited
this positivist with having helped to win acceptance for his own position.”
200


“Born at Turas near Brünn, Mach owed his independence of mind in part to the
fact that until age fifteen he was tutored at home by his father. A landowner
and teacher who sympathized with the rebels of 1848, his father urged Mach to
emulate heroes of Greek and Latin literature. Although young Mach took his
Matura at Krems in 1855, he had already deviated into free thought. He studied
mathematics and physics at Vienna under the German Johannes von Ettingshausen
(1796-1878), earning a doctorate in 1860 and a habilitation in 1861. Soon
thereafter he met Josef Popper-Lynkeus, who became a lifelong friend. For
several years Mach gave private lessons on the psychophysics of Fechner before
becoming a professor of mathematics at Graz from 1864 to 1867. There he became
a close friend of the economist Emanuel Herrmann (1839-1902), who in 1869 put
the world in his debt by inventing the postal card. Mach's most fruitful years
were spent as a professor of experimental physics at Prague from 1867 to 1895.
During 1879-1880, he served as rector of the university, opposing vigorously
its division into German and Czech faculties. After this reform had been
enacted, Mach refused reelection as rector, likening the riots of Czechs
against Germans to wars of religion in the seventeenth century. In 1895 Mach
accepted a call to fill a new chair at Vienna in the history and theory of
inductive sciences […] Despite the acerbity of his views, Mach was an
extremely kind man, unfailingly generous to opponents and students alike.”
199f


“Wilhelm Stekel and Isidor Sadger argued that suicide originates in desire to
expiate sexual guilt, especially that stemming from masturbation, while Adler
saw in adolescent suicide an escape from uncompensated feelings of
inferiority.” 195


“Opera House, Eduard Van der Nüll hanged himself over a cavil that Franz
Joseph had let slip about the otherwise magnificent structure, into which the
architect had poured his life's work. His inseparable companion and
collaborator, August Siccard von Siccardsburg, died two months later of a
heart attack brought on by grief. The emperor was so appalled by the
consequences of his remark—made inadvertently to an adjutant—that for nearly
fifty years thereafter he never voiced opinions in public, uttering instead a
phrase that became proverbial, "Es war sehr schön, es hat mich sehr gefreut"”
194


“In contrast with the qualms of Boltzmann and Gumplowicz stands the fortitude
of Sigmund Freud, who from 1923 to 1939 withstood excruciating pain from
cancer of the palate. If anyone had cause to flee from pain, it was he; in
defiance of it, he wrote a halfdozen books while living to be eighty-three.”
193


“Between 1860 and 1938 an astonishing number of Austrian intellectuals
committed suicide.” 192


“Fascinated by decay, these unemployed sons of the upper and middle classes
carried Baroque reverence for death to unheard-of extremes. To them death
promised release from ennui; in a world gone stale, it alone remained a mighty
unknown. By committing suicide, Weininger enacted what countless others
dreamed of doing.” 187


“Worship of the dead reinforced that preference for things past which
permeated Viennese taste. The collector's zeal of the Biedermeier, the
historicizing architecture of the Ringstrasse, the idyll of the operetta
offered respite from life by substituting timeless communion with past or
imagined utopias. Aesthetic rituals meant in the nineteenth century what
ruins, skulls, and tombs, had meant to the seventeenth: too often Austrians
preferred communing with the dead to succoring the living. Hostility to change
was enshrined in countless ceremonies and monuments, as if music and stone
could abort the future.” 186


“The various attitudes that characterized Austrian thought—aestheticism,
therapeutic nihilism, impressionism—were all part of the national attitude
toward death. […] In contrast with Hungarians, who dreamed of political
action, Austrians cultivated a Baroque vision of death as the fulfillment of
life.” 183


“Endorsing the formula of Chamberlain that Jews constitute not a race but a
mental attitude, Weininger cited Jewish anti-Semitism to corroborate Jews'
innate inferiority. Since Jews like women lack an ego together with its sense
of self-esteem, they must be amoral and lascivious; in a word, they are pimps.
As materialists incapable of piety, lacking even that faith in men which
sustains women, Jews excel above all as research chemists whose solvents
corrode idealism. Flaunting Jewish self-hatred, Weininger dismissed Zionism as
self-defeating: only as an individual can a Jew cease to be Jewish.” 179


“Weininger ranks as one of the most petulant of misogynists. He simply equated
sexuality with woman, who contaminates man in the paroxysm of orgasm. He
diagnosed hysteria as a malady peculiar to woman, caused by conflict between
her exclusively sexual nature and the ideal of chastity, which men foist upon
her. As if parodying male stereotypes about women, Weininger pontificated that
women are free to choose between motherhood and prostitution; tertium non
datur. Since the former merely disguises the latter, the only way for men to
elude earthbound women is to cease procreation. Misogyny afflicted several
other Austro-Hungarian authors, many of them Jewish.” 178


“Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna, 1903).
Probably no other dissertation has gone through so many editions—nearly thirty
by 1940—nor stirred so much controversy, as this diatribe against women and
Jews. Otto was the son of a gifted, if censorious Jewish father, the goldsmith
Leopold Weininger (1854-1922), who had married a woman of inferior talent.
Young Otto grew up with two sisters and a brother, admiring his father's self-
taught mastery of languages, his skill as a goldsmith, his love of Wagner, and
his anti-Semitism. Despising his mother's lack of schooling, Otto allowed
disappointed oedipal feelings to degenerate into rabid antifeminism. […] From
1898 to 1902, he studied at the University of Vienna under Friedrich Jodi
(1849-1914), for whom he wrote a dissertation entitled "Eros und Psyche."
Since Jodl deemed Weininger personally repugnant and had found the
dissertation to abound in extravagances and crudities, he was astonished to
see its success as a book under the title of Geschlecht und Charakter? Whereas
the dissertation had remained self-consciously scientific, the expanded
version smacked of wish-fulfillment in its speculations about Jews and women.
During the summer of 1902 Weininger had converted to Protestantism. […] Upon
returning to Vienna in September, 1903, he fell prey to deepening despondency
that, on October 3, prompted him to rent a room in the house where Beethoven
had died. There he shot himself in the chest after sending his brother and
father letters announcing this intention.” 177


“In an essay of 1913 on "Sex and Culture," Mayreder formulated her conception
of woman's duty. Citing Houston Stewart Chamberlain's distinction between
external civilization (Zivilisation) and inward culture (Kultur), Mayreder
held that the responsibilities of motherhood must keep a woman sexbound, while
a man's freedom to transcend sex permits him to build the external order of
civilization. But because man lacks inner restraints imposed by nature, woman
must serve as the "measure of all things." She has a cultural mission to
prevent man from losing himself in external activity. If she fails to act as a
cultural brake, externality will reign, spreading cruelty and neglect of
emotion.” 175


“By undertaking the study of various arts in relation to one another, art
historians harnessed the aestheticism of their city. Precursors of the Vienna
School included the founder of the Museum for Applied Art, Rudolf Eitelberger
von Edelberg (1817-1885), who strove to better the craftsmanship of artisans.
One of his students, Moriz Thausing (1838-1884), a Bohemain Jew, introduced to
Vienna the technique of attribution perfected by the Italian senator Giovanni
Morelli (1816-1891). Bourgeois collectors of paintings demanded a more
reliable method of verifying the authenticity of canvases, a task that the
medically trained Morelli performed by scrutinizing minute details such as a
nose, ears, and feet. The founder of the Vienna School of Art History was
Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909). Born in Steyr, he studied Greek archaeology under
Alexander Conze (1831-1914), a student of Semper, and diplomatics under the
founder of the Institute for Research in Austrian History, Theodor von Sickel
(1826-1908). Under the influence of Thausing, Wickhoff united connoisseurship
with archaeology and philosophy to achieve a precision of observation
analogous to that demanded by giants of the Vienna Medical School. He was the
first member of the Vienna School to assert the interdependence of culture,
arguing that Christian painting of the second and third centuries had derived
from pagan wall painting and relief sculpture. Even more revolutionary was his
insistence, similar to that of Guido Adler, that every period of art was
equally worthy of study. Discarding the Renaissance canon that had belittled
late Roman art, he compared it with contemporary French impressionism. A
champion of Klimt and of functional architecture, Wickhoff was also an amateur
painter and poet, completing Goethe's Pandora in a fashion that won critical
acclaim.” 169f


“When examining Greek and medieval towns, Sitte discerned a creative will to
form such as the art historian Alois Riegl held underlies all art. Like Riegl,
Sitte postulated that all cities can be compared according to a systematic
aesthetic. Above all, Sitte embodied Viennese aestheticism by blithely
disregarding functional problems. As if he were a stage designer, a city
planner should aim to please the eye of the beholder, not to facilitate
commerce. Sitte seemed to wish to turn cities into backdrops for romantic
opera.” 167f


“Like Makart, Vienna's architects were decorators, who rearranged existing
elements without creating new ones.” 167


“In the visual arts, Schönberg's quest for purity found a counterpart in the
crusade of Loos and Schiele to strip away the ornament that camouflaged
Ringstrasse buildings and the canvases of Makart and Klimt. Schönberg
expounded his penchant for form in a speech of 1913 commemorating Mahler: When
we have taken the pieces apart, we usually are no longer able to put them back
together properly, and we have lost what we had before: the whole with all its
details and its soul. Here the composer espoused what was best in Austrian
thought, a passion for grasping things whole.” 157


“Although eventually aestheticism undermined Vienna's will to survive, for
decades love of art curbed strife while heightening city pride. After an
evening at the theater or May Day in the Prater, a Viennese might with
equanimity regard his city as the pivot of the universe. Where else did
appearance so beguilingly sweeten reality? […] In homes music-making was so
popular that a law forbade playing an instrument after 11:00 p.m. Many
families staged musicales on Sunday afternoon inviting young musicians to
perform.” 150


“Although the public might feel indifferent to politics and nonchalant about
morals, it demanded the utmost from each actor and musician, exercising a
surveillance that guaranteed attention to detail.” 143


“Because the feuilleton embodied Phaeacianism, it outraged zealots like Karl
Kraus, while furnishing a source of innovation for impressionists like
Schnitzler. Together the coffeehouse and the feuilleton supplied an atmosphere
that conduced to innovations in thought.” 142


“Vienna-born Jew, Egon Friedell (1878-1938), born Egon Friedmann, who shone
both as an actor and as a writer. […] Inspired by H. G. Wells' Outline of
History (1920), the aesthete-scholar produced a gigantic feuilleton, full of
striking chapter titles, memorable anecdotes, and exotic cross-references. As
befits a feuilleton, the work reeks of prejudice: the baptized Jew assailed
Freud and preferred France to Germany. In order to discredit the Jewish
doctrine of Providence, Friedell exalted Plato and Gnostics like Marcion in an
unfinished work, Kulturgeschichte des Altertums: Leben und Legende der
vorchristlichen Seele (Zurich and London, 1936-1949). Deploring mechanization,
this admirer of Hans Christian Andersen contended that industrialism had
debased reality, causing art to commit suicide. […] Witty and original,
sometimes frivolous but more often profound, his aperçus offer an unending
source of provocative error.” 141


“The harshest critic of the feuilleton was Kraus, who saw it as the apotheosis
of Schlamperei in writing. Arguing that the subjectivism of feuilletons had
infected the entire press, Kraus indicted journalists for hastening the
decline of the bourgeois world. Either they could choose to cultivate the
language of Goethe, Jean Paul, and Nestroy, or they would drown in a
feuilletonistic sea of half poetry and half lies. Before he began publishing
Die Fackel in 1899, Kraus spurned an offer to succeed Spitzer as feuilleton
editor of the Neue Freie Presse, a position that went to Herzl, who used it to
aid friends such as Schnitzler and Zweig. In the essay, "Heine und die Folgen"
(Vienna, 1910), Kraus singled out Heine as founder of the unholy style—breezy,
superficial, and popular—which had driven out classic style. Paradoxically,
Kraus revered the writing of Jean Paul, who was in many ways the first
feuilletonist. As we shall see, Kraus's philosophy of language emerged as a
critique of the feuilleton, which he believed travestied the identity between
language and ethics.” 140


“Corresponding to the cameraderie of the coffeehouse was the literary genre
known as the Viennese feuilleton. The term had been introduced at Paris about
1800 by drama critic Julien-Louis Geoffroy (1743-1814) to denote the
detachable lower portion of a newspaper's front page. Whereas in Germany
articles unter dem Strich usually concerned culture rather than politics, at
Vienna, the feuilleton developed into a chatty essay on any topic, written to
match the verve and sparkle of conversation. As sprightly and evanescent as
coffeehouse banter, after 1848 the feuilleton furnished a model of wit and
good taste, catering to a demand both for novelty and nostalgia. […] Because
the feuilleton required impromptu writing, it allowed Hungarians to exploit
their skill at extemporizing. The success of Budapest-born writers like
Saphir, Herzl, Nordau, and Salten represented a flowering of Hungarian
improvisation in the German-speaking world.” 139


"The preoccupation of Freud, Schnitzler, and Weininger with sexuality arose in
a society of libertine men and repressed women […] Intellectuals of Young
Vienna came mostly from nouveau riche families. For them aestheticism meant
above all escaping idleness through conversation, dilettantism, and occasional
writing. Dabbling at art made time pass agreeably without exacting any
commitment to larger issues. [...] It was to such idlers that Count Berchtold
referred when warned in 1914 that war with Russia might provoke revolution
there. "Who is supposed to make that revolution?" he asked. "Herr Trotsky in
the Cafe Central?"" 137


“Aristocrats were expected to pay more for every service. If a bourgeois
wished to cut a figure above his class, the easiest way was to overtip with
nobel ostentation. […] In Vienna all houses great and small stood open all
day, often with no concierge in attendance. Promptly at 10:00 p.m., however,
the front gate would be locked; anyone returning thereafter had to pay the
porter (Hausmeister) ten kreutzers. In order to avoid the Sperrkreuzer, it was
customary, except during Fasching, for public functions to end shortly after
9:00 p.m. Thus members of Vienna's best families bowed to the tyranny of their
concierges, while the less privileged might haunt streets and cafes until any
hour.” 135


“a mood of merriment which Arthur Koestler has described: [The nouveaux riches
of the 1920's possessed] ... the unique Viennese art of being not only rich
but actually enjoying it. They had the courteous gaiety and amused self-
mockery and warm malice and flickering erotic spark [of prewar Vienna]. […] as
Hanns Sachs said, there prevailed "a general insincerity with comparatively
little hypocrisy."” 134


“Two attitudes interacted in the outlook of most Viennese: lighthearted
enjoyment of the arts, or aestheticism, and indifference to political and
social reform, or therapeutic nihilism. […] The term Phaeacianism (Phäakentum)
will be employed to designate that preference for merrymaking and make-believe
that the Biedermeier enshrined. More narrowly Phaeacianism characterized
consumers of art, while aestheticism animated producers of it.” 133


“For Renner, the pathos of the empire's collapse was symbolized by loss of a
farm in Moravia which he and his sister had owned jointly. In order to keep
the farm, she had been obliged to become a Czech citizen, while in order to
remain chancellor of Austria, he—the critic of private ownership—had had to
give up the farm. How could one feel loyal, he asked, to a country that
exacted such sacrifices of its citizens? An amateur poet, in 1919 Renner wrote
the national anthem of the First Republic, which Wilhelm Kienzl set to music.
To console himself after 1934, he composed a philosophical epic, which was
published posthumously as Das Weltbild der Moderne […] Reading like a didactic
poem that Mach or Boltzmann might have written, amid Nazi occupation the epic
praised modem science as a citadel of truth. […] Few thinkers embodied so
attractively the Austrian propensity for molding opposites into a living whole
as this peasant proprietor who turned Marxist […] He was the very example of
what Lenin would call petit-bourgeois contradictions.” 126f


“In Renner's view, […] no geographic gerrymandering could achieve that
"democratic Switzerland with a monarchical base" of which the Austro-Marxist
dreamed. In his reverence for the principle of nationality, Renner revived the
romanticism of Eotvos and Palacky. Although he conceded that within the state
class-conflicts might rage, he believed, like the Old Czechs, that inside each
nation such quarrels cease. Because nationality was a sacred trust with which
the state had no right to interfere. Marxism should keep silent where culture
was involved.” 125


“in 1898 Renner took a doctorate in law at Vienna, where his teachers included
the Menger brothers. […] Renner made himself heir of the federalist scheme put
forward'by the Hungarian-born Jewish physician Adolf Fischhof (1816-1893) in
Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes […] Like Bauer after him,
Renner rejected the demand of Jews for cultural autonomy; they were to remain
a religious not a national group.” 124


“The fact that an illegitimate son of peasants could become prime minister, as
did Dollfuss, offended Bauer's sense of propriety. A theoretician, he
respected individuals too highly to run a party efficiently, never regimenting
ideology and devoting more energy to refuting Lenin than to forestalling
Hitler. In his love for debate, Bauer embodied the Schlamperei of Imperial
Austria, convinced that somehow bureaucracy would sustain the state while
educated men discoursed. Like other Austro-Marxists, Bauer exalted
individuality. For him as for Neurath, class struggle meant above all an
instrument for liberating individuals so that they could cultivate leisured
pursuits once reserved to the wealthy. Bauer believed so ardently that
socialism must use constitutional means that he failed to withstand emerging
enemies of democracy.” 123


“In an incisive survey of European thought since Occam, "Das Weltbild des
Kapitalismus" (1924), Bauer ascribed the triumph of mathematical science to
the middle class, while interpreting Darwin as a bourgeois who had projected
onto nature the struggle for existence which afflicted capitalist society.”
121f


“Bauer became in October, 1918, Viktor Adler's subaltern as foreign minister
in the provisional government, assuming full duties after Adler's death on
November 11, 1918. As foreign minister until July 26, 1919, Bauer advocated
Anschluss with Germany—ignoring the warnings of a Vienna-born colleague,
Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941), who having lived in Berlin since 1907 feared
that Austria's Catholics would dilute the energy of Germany's Protestants. […]
In Die Nationalitätenfrage, Bauer marshaled exceptional historical learning to
show that within Austria-Hungary what Friedrich Engels had called nations
without history represented the proletariat, while the Germans and Hungarians
represented middle-class capitalists. Himself a firm nationalist, Bauer
interpreted Austria-Hungary's national struggles as disguised class conflicts.
He advanced this thesis again in Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna,
1923), asserting that oppression of the Czechs had made fission of the empire
inevitable.” 121


“Resort to violence entered the Socialist camp in the person of Adler's son,
Friedrich Adler (1879-1960). Having studied under Ernst Mach, he achieved
worldwide notoriety by assassinating on October 21, 1916, Prime Minister Count
Karl Stürgkh (1859-1916), who since March, 1914, had governed Austria without
convening the Reichsrat. At his trial in May, 1917, Friedrich Adler delivered
such a ringing indictment of wartime tyranny that his execution was postponed.
Eventually Emperor Karl pardoned him. [...] While living in Vienna from 1911
to 1914, Leon Trotsky met nearly every Saturday evening at the Cafe Central
with Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and Max Adler. After 1917 Trotsky deplored their
repudiation of Bolshevism. Josip Broz, later Marshal Tito (1892-), had been
taken prisoner in 1915 by the Russians while a member of the Austro-Hungarian
army. After conversion to communism in Russia, he worked at an auto factory in
Wiener Neustadt while endeavoring to organize the Communist party in
Yugoslavia. During 1923 the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) lived
in Vienna, where his friends included Victor Serge. Although Vienna attracted
non-German Marxists, for years it repelled the most famous of all Austrian
Socialists, Prague-born Karl Kautsky (1854- 1938). As described in his
Erinnerungen und Erörterungen (The Hague, 1960), this son of a Czech painter
and an Austrian actress lived in Vienna from 1863 to 1880, where his father
Jan Kautsky (1827-1896) directed a studio for theater sets. Having been
converted to socialism by the Paris Commune of 1871, Karl studied at the
University of Vienna, before departing in 1880 for Switzerland and Germany. As
editor of Die Neue Zeit from 1883 to 1917, he deplored the moderation of
Viktor Adler and of later Austro-Marxists. After his retirement, Kautsky lived
quietly in Vienna from 1924 to 1938. The chief failing of Austrian socialism
under Viktor Adler was a tendency to ignore the misery of the masses. The SDAP
proved so loyal to Franz Joseph that it recruited an elite among labor while
ignoring the nameless many.” 119


“The father of socialism in Austria was Viktor Adler (1852-1918). This Prague-
born Jew became an ardent German-National student in Vienna. An ally of
Heinrich Friedjung and Engelbert Pernerstorfer, during the early 1870's he
helped organize a pan-German league of university students. In debate against
Sigmund Freud, Adler was maltreated by his combative opponent. Oddly enough,
during the 1880's Adler inhabited the ground-floor flat at Berggasse 19, which
from 1892 to 1908 Freud used as an office. As a student of medicine, Adler was
befriended by the cerebral anatomist Theodor Meynert; exuding concern for
patients, Adler excoriated the therapeutic nihilism that made physicians
prefer autopsies to cures. In 1878 Adler and his father were baptized
Protestants. To the end, Adler harbored Jewish self-hatred, depising the
majority of Jews as uncouth and dreaming that socialism would accelerate
assimilation. In 1885 Adler joined the Socialist party after his application
to become inspector of trade under the law of 1883 had been rebuffed. Between
1887 and 1889, he spent many months in jail for efforts to organize a unified
Social Democratic party, a goal that he achieved at the party congress of
Hainfeld in December, 1888. Thereafter, he enjoyed relative immunity from the
Anarchist Law of 1886, becoming a stout defender of the Habsburg Empire. In
1889 he declared at Paris: "Except for France and England, Austria has perhaps
the most liberal laws in all Europe, so much so that it resembles a republic
which has a monarch in place of a president at its head." From 1905 to 1918
Adler served as a deputy in the Reichsrat, where in 1907 Socialist deputies
took the lead in enacting universal suffrage. On November 28, 1905, Adler had
organized a general strike to show sympathy with the Russian revolution and to
demand universal suffrage. The march of 250,000 workers impelled the
government, at the urging of Emil Steinbach, to grant this demand which led in
1907 to the election of eighty-seven Social Democratic deputies. Earlier, in
1890 Adler had shown his skill as an organizer by inaugurating Socialist May
Day on the Prater to demand an eight-hour working day. The choice of May 1 had
been made by the Second International at Paris in 1889 so as to coincide with
an American rally already scheduled for that day. […] Under Adler's
leadership, the Social Democratic Workers party (SDAP) of Austria represented
above all Sudeten Germans who had flocked to Vienna. Although many of its
leaders were Jewish, they tended to share Adler's anti-Semitism. Middle-class
Jews gravitated to the party out of sympathy for laborers, whose exclusion
from society seemed to mirror their own. Engelbert Pernerstorfer, a German
nationalist Catholic with whom Adler attended the Schottengymnasium, became
infected by his friend's anti-Semitism” 118


“the Austro-Marxists have never received the attention they deserve. In 1913
Stalin pilloried them as fellow travelers of the bourgeoisie, and after 1918
their repudiation of terrorism ostracized them from the Communist
International. Their intense intellectuality, combined with eagerness to emend
the existing order” 117


“It was as if Kelsen expected imperial bureaucracy to enforce benevolent norms
forever, liberating jurists to design edifices of thought. Even participation
in drafting and implementing the Constitution of the First Republic cannot
exculpate Kelsen from the charge of therapeutic nihilism; together with other
democrats he fled Fascist onslaught. Unrivaled at juggling ideas, theorists
like Kelsen could not safeguard conditions that made theorizing possible.” 116


“In dissecting Marx and Lenin, he lamented that Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864)
had perished in a duel before he could formulate democratic socialism. […]
Attacking Othmar Spann while anticipating the anti-Platonic polemic of Karl
Popper, Kelsen praised relativism as the world view of democracy.” 115


Born at Prague of Jewish parents, in 1883 Kelsen moved to Vienna, where he
attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. At the University of Vienna, Otto
Weininger awakened his interest in philosophy. In 1905 Kelsen wrote a
dissertation under the redoutable Edmund Bematzik on Dante's De Monarchic.
Next he studied under Jellinek at Heidelberg and Gerhard Anschutz at Berlin
before becoming a docent at Vienna in 1911," 113


"During the 1920's his collection of murder weapons, passkeys, and forgeries
trained Vienna's police, as well as Johann Schober's state police, to become
Europe's most advanced. One of Gross's Students, Adolf Lenz (1868-1959),
enlarged his master's research, instituting the discipline of criminal
biology. 113


“Hans Gross (1847-1915), the creator of modern crime detection. […] Thanks to
a Vienna-born theorist Franz von Liszt (1851-1919) Gross's approach was early
incorporated into penology and penal law. […] Gross summarized his experience
in the two-volume Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter (Munich, 1893; 6th ed.,
1914), which was widely translated. The third edition of 1898 coined the term
criminalistics (Kriminalistik) to designate scientific crime detection.” 112


“no city—with the possible exception of Paris—fostered so many outlandish
schemes as did the Habsburg capital, partly because piecemeal reform was so
hopelessly obstructed.” 112


"In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon adversary system, continental law enlists
attorneys as colleagues of judges, with whom they collaborate to enforce the
rules. Professors, in turn, play a major role by revising and codifying
statutes, a task that in Great Britain and the United States falls mainly to
legislators. […] legal dogmatists like Rudolf von Jhering insisted that the
state alone enjoys competence to delimit its own authority, a privilege that
Georg Jellinek called Kompetenz-Kompetenz. Backing state supremacy, on the
other hand, was Hans Gross, who perfected techniques of investigating and
prosecuting crime. […] Critics included Eugen Ehrlich, who esteemed folkways
of Gemeinschaft society as a superior source of law; Anton Menger, who
advocated community socialism; and Karl Renner, who with Marxist tools
unmasked private law as a delegation of state power to property owners." 107


“Separation of private law from public law exalts the state as benevolent
protector of private rights, especially of property, at the same time
exempting bureaucracy from redress by private citizens. In Germany and
Austria-Hungary, not only did Roman law elevate judges into a sacrosanct
position, but it instilled belief in the infallibility of the state.” 106


“It seems likely, nevertheless, that economists adapted non-interventionism
from the impartiality traditional in Josephinist bureaucracy. Although many a
model official had never pondered Herbart, some may have fortified their ideal
by studying a philosophy that embodied it. Once the Leibnizian vision had
become institutionalized, its tenets, however watered down, impinged upon
every bureaucrat.” 105


“It seems more plausible, however, to identify the Austrian school with the
standpoint not of rentiers but of bureaucrats. Financially and socially
secure, professor-officials forged techniques whereby to regulate economic
life impartially. As employees of the state and servants of the emperor, they
stood above the fray, free to expound a standpoint abstracted from class.
[...] Kauder postulates a parallel between the economists' belief in abstract
regularities and the faith of Bohemian Reform Catholics in natural order. For
Bolzano and Stifter, as for Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, the task of statesman and
scholar alike was to sustain eternal verities embodied in society's hierarchy.
Böhm-Bawerk rejected Marx, says Kauder, because Marx urges man to play the
sorcerer's apprentice; to overturn natural order for fragmentary goals is to
sacrifice stability for a will-of-the-wisp. Kauder detects an analogy between
Wieser's advocacy in Das Gesetz der Macht (1926) of charity as the highest
good and Stifter's "gentle law" (sanfte Gesetz): both seek to maximize human
potential at all levels without dismantling hierarchy. Austrian economists
experienced aesthetic joy in beholding natural law guide the economy, just as
Stifter and Bolzano cherished God's work in nature and society. For the
invisible hand of Adam Smith, the economists substituted a Leibnizian premise
of harmony between created nature and social law. [...] If Menger, Wieser, and
Böhm-Bawerk had imbibed the Leibnizian vision, from whom did they absorb it?
Was it perhaps from Herbartian textbooks used at gymnasium during the 1850's
and 1860's?” 104


“They displayed greater unity than the Vienna School of Art History or
Brentano and his students. The Austrian economists operated at a high level of
abstraction, preferring examples drawn from preindustrial economies like that
attributed to Robinson Crusoe. They all endorsed Menger's postulate that
generalizations or idealizing assumptions are indispensable for organizing the
data of social behavior. One of the most trenchant appraisals of the Austrian
school came from an associate of Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin (1887-1938), who
studied economics at Vienna from 1912 to 1914 before being interned as a
Russian spy in August, 1914.” 103


“On a visit to England during 1906, he had glorified that country's free-
wheeling entrepreneurs, while blaming Austria's bureaucracy for snarling her
economy in red tape. After he had insisted in 1919 that taxes, not income from
nationalized industries, should finance economic recovery,” 101f


“[Schumpeter:] His father, a wealthy textile entrepreneur, died when his son
was four. After his mother had moved to Vienna, in 1893 she married the
military commandant of the city, Sigismund von Kéler. From 1893 to 1901,
Joseph attended the Theresianum as a day student, where as a bourgeois
arriviste he acquired a taste for things aristocratic. After taking his
doctorate at Vienna under Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk in 1906, the next year he
married an Englishwoman, from whom he separated after a few months, although
unable because of his Catholicism to dissolve the marriage until 1920. After
two years in Cairo, he earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1909, followed by
two lonely years at Czernowitz. As a professor at Graz from 1911 to 1921, he
frequently commuted to Vienna, striving in vain during World War One to
negotiate a separate peace through English friends. […] his advocacy of a
mixed economy estranged both Socialists and clericals. During the early 1920's
he served as president of the Biedermannbank at Vienna; when it failed in
1924, after exhausting his personal fortune, he went deeply into debt to pay
off its creditors, going far beyond what the law required. Schumpeter's
marriage in 1925 to Annie Riesinger, a protegee of his mother, ended with her
death in childbirth, followed soon thereafter by that of his mother. From 1924
to 1932, Schumpeter taught public finance at Bonn, departing thence to become
a professor of economics at Harvard University.” 101


“The man who did most to systematize Menger's theory was Friedrich von Wieser
(1851-1926). Born in Vienna the son of an army quartermaster who was ennobled
in 1859, Wieser studied law there under Lorenz von Stein. Through reading
Spencer and Tolstoy's War and Peace, he was weaned away from the "great man"
theory of history to the analysis of anonymous social forces. Although he read
Menger's Grundsätze in 1872, he did not attend his lectures. Together with his
classmate from the Schottengymnasium Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), Wieser
studied at Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Jena from 1875 to 1877. At Heidelberg in
1876, he wrote a seminar paper for Karl Knies on the concept of alternative
cost, arguing that cost measures what might have been produced with the same
raw materials. After returning to Vienna, Wieser showed his papers to Menger,
who encouraged the aspiring bureaucrat to habilitate in economics. From 1884
to 1903 he served as a professor of economics at the German University in
Prague; thereafter he succeeded to Menger's chair at Vienna, serving as
minister of trade in 1917-1918.” 99


“Oskar Kraus claimed to have detected a parallel between Menger and
Aristotle's Topics, as interpreted by Brentano, without being able to show
that Menger had read either work. In his quest for laws, conceivably Menger
was influenced by Herbartians such as Robert Zimmermann, who discerned formal
regularities in social life. Menger's Grundsätze preceded by three years
Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, whose concept of value as a
mode of intentionality parallels Menger's conception of want.” 98


“To employ Pribram's terms, Menger defended nominalism against organicism.
Schmoller contended that because economics has no eternal laws, it can be
studied only one society at a time. Menger, however, postulated a mechanism
that pervades every society. Although their polemic polarized the issue for
twenty years—helping Pribram to arrive at his categories—in the end Max Weber
fused the two approaches into his concept of ideal type. Weber formulated what
Friedrich von Wieser called "idealizing assumptions" to classify the data of
past cultures. Thus Menger's models could be used to guide Schmoller's
historicist reconstructing of the past.” 97


“What Pribram dubbed universalism corresponds to the realism of Herbartians
who "believe that reason can discover the substance of things and teach the
real laws underlying the cause of real events." In what follows, the terms
holism, organicism, feudalism, ascription, and particularism are used
interchangeably to denote Gemeinschaft mentality. The terms individualism,
nominalism, empiricism, industrialism, capitalism, and achievement-orientation
designate Gesellschaft values. It seems appropriate to begin a survey of
social theory in Austria with its most nominalistic school, that of marginal
analysis founded by the economist Carl Menger.” 96


"Born and educated in Prague, Pribram studied under Georg Jellinek in
Heidelberg before becoming a docent in economics at Vienna from 1907 to 1921.
Thereafter he taught at Geneva and Frankfurt, settling in the United States in
1934. […] Pribram could have cited numerous individuals to document the
affinity between Viennese middle classes and empirical thinkers in England and
France. The friendship of Theodor Gomperz with John Stuart Mill, Fritz
Mauthner's devotion to Bacon and Hume, Josef Popper-Lynkeus' reverence for
Voltaire, and Freud's sympathy with French and British psychiatry show how
nominalistic reasoning inspired Jews of Vienna and Bohemia. It was they who
furnished the luminaries of Austro-Marxism and philosophy of language. In
addition, students of Brentano cultivated British philosophy: disquisitions by
Alexius Meinong on Hume and Anton Marty on Locke parallel the veneration that
Friedrich Jodi and Moritz Schlick harbored for the Scottish skeptic." 94ff


“A tax on private property devised by Hugo Breitner (1873-1946) financed
seventy-five thousand housing units between 1919 and 1934, although hardly any
slums were razed. The Tenant Protection Law of 1917 remained in force, keeping
rents so low that private capital lacked incentive to build. Apartment
complexes, whose residents had to belong to the Social Democratic party,
dotted previously conservative districts, guaranteeing a Socialist majority
for years to come.” 93