I have heard historians argue two things about Vienna. One: Writing about its golden age is easy; there is so much creativity from so many great characters, with contributions spanning so many fields that it is hard to go wrong. And two: Writing about Vienna's golden age is hard; there are too many great characters, so much creativity in such a diversity of fields and so many changes in the surroundings that it is difficult to keep track, let alone tell a good story without missing something essential. Richard Cockett's new book, it seems to me, is evidence of the second claim.
It's not that Cockett, who is perhaps best known for his study of liberal think tanks in the UK, is unaware of the difficulty of trying to capture the spirit of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna. He is explicit about his desire to avoid the pitfall of writing the history of the city through the lens of one or two heroic individuals, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Sigmund Freud. And his book contains an interesting and original chapter detailing the contributions of women to the arts and sciences in the capital of the Habsburg Empire, illustrating his desire to not leave something essential out.
The problem is that amid all the wonderful scientists and artists, the wrongheaded coffeehouse frequenters, and the opportunistic intellectuals he discusses, he forgets to tell a good story. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Cockett is not content to merely capture the original spirit of Vienna. He also wants to demonstrate how the creators of Vienna changed the wider world, an adventure that takes the reader to places as varied as 1950s Hollywood, advertising, shopping mall architecture, Cold War think tanks, and of course the neoliberal revolution in 1980s British politics.
The opening chapters are the most rewarding part of the book. They take us on a grand tour through the four different political and ideological orientations that characterized Vienna: the exclusionary vision of fascist Black Vienna, the scientific rationalism of the reformers of Red Vienna, the conservative liberalism and Bildung-ideal of Vienna's bourgeois, and the more aloof, aesthetic, and abstract aims of Viennese modernists.
Drawing on the rich literature in the history of economics, Cockett connects all four visions to relevant economic schools of thought: the romantic nationalist and later fascist thought of Othmar Spann for Black Vienna, the practical and theoretical contributions of the Austro-Marxists for Red Vienna, the famed contributions of the Mises circle for liberal Vienna, and the mathematical economics of Oskar Morgenstern and Karl Menger for modernist Vienna.
There is also the start of an original story, one with considerable plausibility. Cockett argues that the four worlds of Viennese thought radicalized in the interwar period, after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. But given his almost solitary focus on individuals and their contributions, it remains hard to see how the four worlds influenced each other, or how they were influenced by the cultural and political context of the time. Without serious comparative work or explicit questions, the thesis remains unproven at best. This is a missed opportunity, because it is certainly an important question to ask whether it mattered for the development of ideas that the Austro-Marxists governing Vienna were confronting practical political issues such as housing the working classes, while other circles of intellectuals retreated into the world of pure ideas, or felt permanently disenfranchised from their context.
But it is in the second half of the book that confusion takes over. A chapter titled “Sex, Shopping, and the Sovereign Consumer” fails to notice the deep tension between Freudian-inspired theories of marketing appealing to the unconscious, and the optimistic neoliberal idea of clearheaded and sovereign consumers. Elsewhere the management scholar Peter Drucker is first described as a close friend of Karl Polanyi and later as an ally of Friedrich Hayek, without making clear how both could be true. In another chapter Cockett interestingly argues that Viennese ideas had a lasting impact on both sides of the Iron Curtain, although his attempt to blame the recruitment of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spies on Viennese culture seems a stretch. More importantly, he never reflects on what the diverging impact of one set of ideas in different contexts tells us about that elusive notion of influence.
After his great introduction to Black Vienna, Cockett is, rightly, at pains to demonstrate the complicity of many Austrians in the rise of antisemitism and fascism. But he manages to fully undermine his case by concluding that “the Austrian Nazis went about their killing with the same distinctive diligence as their victims exhibited in Red Vienna's intellectual hinterland. After all, they were so often products of the same pedagogy at the University of Vienna and other such institutions; they just applied their methodological rigour and ‘exact thinking’ to mass-murder rather than abstract philosophy” (219). I too believe that ideas have influence, but maybe not in this manner.
After such harsh judgments about the legacy of Austrian ideas, one might expect that Cockett is predominantly critical of the way that Vienna has “created” the modern world—an impression that is reinforced by his thesis of interwar radicalization and his recurring criticisms of the cult of individual genius in Vienna. But no, the concluding chapter goes in yet another direction and praises the humble temperament of the Viennese. The final paragraph lauds the “extraordinary” ease with which they moved “fluidly between business and academia, the arts and sciences, philosophy, and the design of door handles,” and their “liberating embrace of intellectual heterodoxy.” Cultural historians have often drawn attention to the Viennese love of paradoxes; Cockett's new book is full of them.
