A Cozy Little World: Reflections on Context in Austrian Intellectual History

Abstract

Whilecontextualization is basic to all historical analysis, modern Austrian intellectual history exhibits a particular preference for strong contextual accounts of cultural development. Since the 1970s, the literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a birthplace of modernism—associated with scholars such as Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, William Johnston, William McGrath, and above all Carl Schorske—has endorsed the view, famously expressed by the poet Friedrich Hebbel, that Austria was the “little world where the big world holds its tryouts.” Vienna's cultural efflorescence, it is argued, was exemplary not only for its magnitude and innovation, but also for the close affiliations of its participants. “No one who has studied the high culture of Vienna in the period of liberal ascendancy,” Carl Schorske remarked programmatically, “can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components.”