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The Emergence of Sociology in Austria 1885–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

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Abstract

None would deny the fateful role of Austria in European political history during the past century. Her place in intellectual history is of equal importance, as several recent studies have reminded us. Her contribution to the emergence of sociology was both important and peculiar, yet its distinctiveness has often been overlooked. This is partly because of the tendency not to discriminate between Austrian and German thought, and partly because of concentration on successful and positive contributions, rather than on inhibited and negative ones. The latter, however, may be even more instructive than the former.

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1976

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References

(1) In addition to Carl Schorske's valuable studies, there is now Janik, A. and Toulmin, S. E., Wittgenstein's Vienna (London 1973)Google Scholar. Above all, I am indebted to William Johnston, M., The Austrian Mind (Berkeley 1972)Google Scholar, an indispensable work of synopsis and synthesis, although my sociological interstudies, pretations differ from his.

(2) On this, and the history of sociology in Austria generally, see Rosenmayr, L., Sociology in Austria (Graz 1966)Google Scholar, on which I have relied throughout for details of fact.

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(5) His champion in America was Lester F. Ward. In Germany, his most important disciple was Franz Oppenheimer.

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(11) Kann, R. A., The Multinational Empire. Nationalism and National Reform in the Hapsburg Monarchy 1848–1318 (New York 1970), p. 57Google Scholar. Kann quotes the following illuminating passage from Redlich's, JosefDas österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem (Leipzig 1920), vol. I, p. 36:Google Scholar

In Vienna and in the circles of the German bourgeoisie in general there had developed a vigorous, but not politically clear, concept of the Gesamtstaat. One became accustomed to the Great Power idea of the monarchy […] When the revolution, like a volcano, brought the tremendous power of the national idea to the fore, the Germans faced the other peoples as strangers with no understanding of their national ambitions. But they themselves began at that very time to turn vigorously their old cultural national feeling to the political sphere. That was perhaps just the reason why they considered the same phenomenon in other peoples as an inimical power which threatened them […] Even if this ‘state’, due to its absolutist character, was strongly repulsive to the bourgeois class of the Germans in Austria and their young political ‘world of ideas', they were soon reconciled to it by considering that the authority in this state represented a national asset to them, the expression of their old national master position in this empire.

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(18) Ilsa Barea, herself a Jew active in Viennese socialism, has remarked that the memmessage of Arthur Schnitzler's Der Weg ins Freie is that in Vienna, Jews as a group were imprisoned in their ethnic status. ‘There ia no “road into the open” for them; such a road is never for groups, always for individuals only’; Barea, I., Vienna, Legend and Reality (London 1966), p. 330Google Scholar. This would mean that Jews had to individualize and universalize their iden- tities by manipulating their group memmessage berships.

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(30) Leibniz in fact wrote his Monadologie and Principes de la nature et de la grâce while in Vienna as a guest of Prince Eugene.

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(32) The quotation is from Schorske, C.E., The Transformation of the Garden: ideal and society in Austrian literature, Am. Hist. Rev., LXXII (1967), p. 1310Google Scholar. Schorske is discussing the ‘hero’ of Andrian-Werburg's, The Garden of Knowledge (1895) — subtitled Ego NarcissusGoogle Scholar. He continues: ‘Life began as an “alien task” and ended without contact with “the other”’. Cf. Johnston's, treatment of the relationship of Mach's phenomenalism with literary impressionism in Vienna, op. cit. pp. 185–6Google Scholar and sources cited there.

(33) Johnston, W.M., op. cit. p. 198Google Scholar.

(34) Kolakowski, L., Positivist Philosophy (London 1972), p. 211Google Scholar.

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(37) Menger, C., Problems, etc. p. 63Google Scholar.

(38) In 1884, Böhm-Bawerk agreed with Menger that the ‘economic subjects’ of the new school were the atoms of society and that its task was ‘to restore the precise atomistic tendency’. Quoted in Bukharin, N., The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (New York 1970), p. 40Google Scholar. (Naturally sociologists do not have to be holists to deny —as they must— social atomism).

(39) In System der Werttheorie (Leipzig 18971898)Google Scholar.

(40) von Wieser, F., Social Economics (London 1927), pp. 39Google Scholar. (The original, Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft (1914) was commissioned by Max Weber).

(41) von Mises, L., Epistemological Problems of Economics (New York 1960), p. 13Google Scholar.

(42) C.E. Schorske, op. cit.

(43) Kelsen, H., General Theory of Law and State (New York 1961), p. 175Google Scholar.

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(45) Hindess, B., The ‘Phenomenological’ Sociology of Alfred Schutz, Economy and Society, I (1972), pp. 127Google Scholar.

(46) Ibid, citing SCHUTZ, The Pheno- GELLmenology of the Social World (London 1972), p. 12.

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(49) It is worth noting at this point that none of the major figures in the Austrian school of economics was Jewish. In Jurisprudence, Kelsen was of Jewish origin and converted to Catholicism.

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(59) Johnston, W.M., op. cit. p. 312Google Scholar.

(60) See Adler, Max on the relation between Stein, Kelsen and Spann in Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus (Darmstadt 1964), pp. 4349 and 137, nGoogle Scholar.

(61) In this sense, Austro-Marxism was an alternative to Zionism, which of course originated from the same milieu.

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