Review of William M. Johnston's "The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Johnston makes a concerted effort to leave absolutely no stone unturned. He begins with a brief adumbration of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emphasizing its frivolity, decadence, and rampant materialism, especially among the nobility. The kind of bureaucracy that we associate with the writings of Karl Kraus and Kafka were only too real for Austrians, a mixture of both uniformity and indolence, or as Johnston says, “absolutism mitigated by Schlamperei.” He includes sections on both university life and military culture, apart from which Austrian social life would have been unrecognizable. Both religion and anticlericalism were fundamental, too.

The amount of information and number of names in this book can be exhausting, and this coming from someone who reads books on graduate-level syllabi for fun. It was so tiring, that after reaching the 300 page mark, I had to set it down for a week to find the energy to finish it. None of this is to say that I did not enjoy the book; I did, and I learned a great deal from it. But it does suffer from a surfeit of ambition. Because of the sheer number of names and ideas mentioned, it might in fact serve many people better as a reference work, rather than a book that you sit down and read from cover to cover.

There are a number of minor cavils I have with the book. 1) Hungarian intellectuals get about fifty pages at the very end, and the only major figures discussed are Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim. 2) Johnston continually refers to people by the geographic region from which they come and their religion, often starting sentences with, for example, “this Silesian Jew” or “that Viennese Lutheran,” even when these identities have no relevance to his discussion of their ideas. 3) He refers to several figures as “Marcionists,” but only explains how they are Marcionists once he is more than halfway through the book. 4) While his designation of many of these seminal figures as “therapeutic nihilists” is at times convincing, Johnston uses the phrase to pigeonhole some ideas into narrow categories at the cost of investigating their true complexity. 5) Lastly, as I have hinted at before, the book reads as more of a compendium of ideas and names than a book which presents a thesis, argues against or for it with evidence, and presents a conclusion. 6) Lastly, there is no mistake about the focus here: it is almost wholly intellectual history. The words “and social” could easily have been dropped from the title of the book, and would have given a fairer impression of what was presented between its covers.

None of this should discourage anyone with a real sense of gusto for this type of history. The real meat of the book is in its utterly exhaustive attempt to mention and account for every aspect of Viennese intellectual history. These are just a few of the areas that he covers: economic theory, psychology, legal theory, social theory, the history of “Austro-Marxism,” music and music criticism, the visual arts, the writing of history and historiography, art and art history, philosophy (and not just generally – the philosophy of science, mathematics, logic, and the Vienna Circle), religion and theology, the social trends in Bohemian Reform Catholicism, and the birth of what can properly be called “geopolitics.”

The book’s coverage of most familiar figures – Freud, Kafka, and Strauss, to name a few – is perfectly adequate. However, it should really be most prized from rescuing dozens of names from the brink of obscurity. Of the more than seventy figures covered, I would imagine that more than half are probably not familiar to most of the English-speaking world. 

It has proven especially edifying for me in respect to some of the literature I have read on fascism. While certainly not a major theme, one can definitely perceive varying types of extremism forming before your very eyes as you read about some of the social and political theory of the time, especially in the sections on Othmar Spann and the increasingly popular anti-Semitism of the time. If you read German fluently, the book’s notes and bibliography combined run to almost one hundred pages, which should provide a good place to start, even considering the book’s age (it was originally published in 1972). I would recommend this book to anyone who was interested in the time period, but reading it through might not be for everyone.