In April 1809—less than four years after Austerlitz—Austria declared war on France and entered the field as the champion of a vanquished German Empire. In their analyses of the Habsburg bid to restore the old order in the Germanies, historians have stressed certain internal developments within the Austrian Empire that made war possible: a revitalized army, a strong feeling of German nationalism, an embittered émigré lobby, and a powerful war party. This article explores the importance of the factions within the imperial family in relation to these events and points up an irony in the Austrian decision. For while the emperor Francis viewed the war as a final effort to save the dynasty, Count Philipp Stadion, his chief minister and leader of the war party, capitalized on the divergent points of view within the family to attain his own ends. His principal concern was to restore the old political order, to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), and to reconstruct the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. By skillful manipulation of ideology and dynastic ambition, he won most of the imperial princes to his side. They, in turn, persuaded the emperor to commit himself to a foreign policy that jeopardized his monarchy for the sake of a war whose diplomatic goals interested him scarcely at all.

The tribute given to Saul Alinsky on his death in 1972 indicates the attention paid in our age to the problems of community organizing. Most citizen groups formed in response to such threats as urban renewal, danger to the environment, or mandatory busing face problems of factionalism, inefficiency, lack of money, and even conflicting loyalties of their members, unless they have the direction of someone like Alinsky, who earned his reputation as a professional organizer. The alternative is to found a group imbued with an ideology which can be characterized as radical (“as a kind of mental and moral discipline”) and an organization which consequently reflects this discipline. The existence of such political organizations, “specially designated and organized bands of men [who] might play a creative part in the political world,” of individuals motivated to join forces “with any man who might help them without regard to the older bonds of family and neighborhood” have a historical origin: they were the contribution of the religious wars in sixteenth-century Europe. The Calvinists were the ancestors of the Bolsheviks.

The beginning student of German economic history, should he happen to read more than one text, may be pardoned a certain sense of confusion. General texts agree that Germany became an industrial power, but there remains a remarkable uncertainty as to when this occurred. “During the period from 1870 to 1914 Germany was transformed from a predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial state,” asserts Koppel Pinson. He explicitly dismisses the 1850's as a “prelude,” but Ralph Flenley insists that “the real ‘foundation time’ came earlier, most markedly in the fifties….Not the railways alone but the whole economic framework of modern Germany arose during the period before 1870.” In a recent short synthesis of German economic history, Knut Borchardt warns that “experts still disagree” over the beginning date of the “foreward leap.”

During the last ten years historians have begun to reinterpret nearly every aspect of Nazi history. Many of their conclusions are very fruitful indeed. But there has as yet appeared no satisfactory reinterpretation of Nazi ideology. The study of Nazi ideology presents some apparently intractable problems; many scholars believe, moreover, that political thought played a relatively unimportant part in the rise (and fall) of the Third Reich. For these and other reasons, some of the most important source material for the study of Nazi ideology has been almost totally neglected. This is the large quantity of writings and programs published by the various Nazi leaders before 1933.

After an agreement between Nazi Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley and Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach on December 8, 1993, providing the necessary organizational background, one of the most curious experiments in National Socialist educational policy was launched. The first Reichsberufswettkampf, or Reich Vocational Contest, brought more than half a million young people3 between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one together and encouraged them to compete against each other in fifteen professional fields, between April 9 and 14 of 1934. At the end of the month, fourteen boys and six girls were summoned to Berlin to be declared “Reich Victors,” in the presence of highest government and party plenipotentiaries.

While on vacation in Rome during the fall of 1913, Freud mentioned in a letter that his visit to the eternal city had restored his zest for work and that in addition to several other pieces he had written the preface to his book Totem and Taboo. In this preface he modestly notes that essays “represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology,” but taken as a whole the four essays in fact present as bold and ingenious a theory on the nature and origins of human civilization as that proposed in Rousseau's Second Discourse a century and a half earlier. Rome was, in every sense, an appropriate place to launch such an ambitious undertaking, and as a connoisseur of jokes and irony Freud may well have chosen his vacation residence, the Eden Hotel, at least in part because of its name. However, the picture Freud draws of primitive man's first steps toward the establishment of civilization is far from edenic. Near the end of Totem and Taboo Freud conjures up a description of the primal crime on which human culture rests: “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together; killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.”

The transportation of the nineteenth century; the opening of fertile virgin soil, farmed by extensive methods, in North America, Argentina, and Russia; the expansion of animal husbandry in the Americas and Australia; the development of refrigeration and canning; a chronic worldwide shortage of currency; and such natural catastrophes as the destruction of French vineyards by phylloxera, epidemics of hoof-and-mouth disease, and years of drought followed by years of excessive rain, produced a severe crisis for European farmers in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. European farmers found themselves in a squeeze between the cheap prices of their overseas competitors and their own high production costs, which were caused by intensive or antiquated methods. Two alternative policies confronted European of the high-cost areas.

Every state church has a two-sided history. On the one hand, as a religious institution it contributes to and is influenced by currents of theology and modes of ecclesiastical organization transcending national boundaries. On the other hand, as part of the constituted authority of a particular state, the church is affected and even controlled by secular and national policies having little or nothing to do with mankind's earthly pursuit of divine purpose.

Relying heavily upon Freud's greatest work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Professors Carl Schorske and William McGrath have attempted to increase our understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis. Both authors feel that the key to Freud's discoveries lies in his reaction to the sociopolitical realities of late nineteenth-century Vienna, and while the articles differ somewhat in emphasis their arguments are sufficiently similar so that they can be treated together. To Schorske and McGrath psychoanalysis had its origins in Freud's decision to give up his initial desire to mount a direct political (even revolutionary) attack on the inequities of the existing society for a “counter-political” psychology which enabled him to adjust to the existing political situation and even achieve a measure of scientific success. As a youth Freud had radical political aspirations and was even active in radical political organizations. However, the hopelessness of the liberal position in Vienna and the rise of anti-Semitic popular movements led Freud to believe that direct political action would not be successful. By reducing political conflict to father-son conflict Freud, like other liberals, would ignore the reality of the political and learn to live (albeit imperfectly) in a world which he could not influence. A career in science could bring recognition and at least partial acceptance, and thus a minimum of satisfaction at least.

In the political system of imperial Germany, the personal interplay between the Kaiser and the chancellor was the single most important factor in the formulation of policy within the government; and this seems especially true during the reign of Kaiser William II, whose vivid personality lent distinctive nuances to the form and manner of Germany's domestic and foreign policies. This paper will attempt to analyze the relationship between William and Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe, German chancellor from 1894 to 1900, and the effects of that relationship on three major issues of policy: antisocialist legislation, naval expansion, and reform of court-martial procedures in the German army and navy.

This study of the economic proposals of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and the German Free Trade Unions (ADGB, Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) during the years 1929–33 is not intended merely to revive a long-forgotten discussion of German economic policy.By exploring the complex interaction during the depression of economic theory, in the form of half-articulated assumptions as well as formal systems, and political ideology and behavior, it attempts to deepen our understanding of the fundamental political conflicts produced by modern economic crises. The Social Democratic Party and the Free Trade Unions had important political roles in the Weimar Republic. Their strong interest after 1929 in reviving the economy and in preventing the rise of a National Socialist regime makes them especially appropriate subjects to explore the relationship between economic theory and politics.

Rather than direct himself to a serious discussion of the important substantive issues involved, Professor McGrath chose to reply to our interpretation of some of Freud's motives with a series of angry assertions. We are disappointed, but we still have a few comments on his response.

After reading the comments of Rothman and Isenberg on my article I knew what it must have felt like to be the woman who went before Solomon to complain that her baby had been stolen. They begin by claiming that the “false premise” on which my article (and Schorske's) is based is that Freud's psychoanalytic theory “was essentially counterpolitical or nonpolitical.” The whole point of my article, however, is, as I say on page 52, to show “how closely Freud's theory was related to the world of politics.” In my view the important question is not whether or not it was political, but rather the changing directions in which the political-psychological relationships operated over the course of Freud's development. After oversimplifying my argument to suggest that I claim Freud disowned his early revolutionary impulses, they counter with the claim that his theory is “revolutionary (and radical) in the most significant sense of the term.” Yet on page 46 I do in fact refer to his “revolutionary sexual theories,” and the point of my argument is to show just how his early revolutionary political impulses are transformed into such revolutionary scientific theories (see p. 57). However, to argue as the commentators do that Freud's theories represented an “attack on the existing social order” as effective or “even more effective” than that of Marx (pp. 59–60) is surely a fine example of an academic perception of reality.