PETER BERGER
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greater- natural disasters, disease and war- but the individual be–
longed to himself in a much clearer way. These observations could
all be subsumed under the proposition of Arnold Gehlen that ancient
man had "character," while modern man has "personality." The dif–
ference is that, paradoxically, the sociological theorist Gehlen
deplored this change, while Musil, the philosopher-turned-Dichter,
welcomed it, despite all the difficulties it created, as an advance in
human self-consciousness.
If Ulrich is a man without qualities, Austria-Hungary (or
Kakania, as Musil calls it) may be called a nation without qualities.
The linguistic confusion underlying Austro-Hungarian institutions
reflects the uncertainty regarding the true nature of the monarchy.
In a long satirical excursus, a chapter aptly entitled "A State Which
Perished Because of a Speech Defect," Musil elaborates this point.
The Hungarian half of the monarchy had a clear national identity,
even if this had to be imposed coercively by the Magyars on their
various Slavic subject populations (that imposition too, of course,
failed in the end). But the Austrian half did not even have a name for
itself. Its official name was the "Kingdoms and Lands Represented
in the Imperial Parliament." How could anyone identify himself
with such a designation? Yet, as Leinsdorf and General Stumm
knew very well, there was such a thing as Austrian patriotism- a
curious mixture of the archaic (this empire, after all, had been in ex–
istence for nearly a millennium) and the ultramodern (a nation-state
without a nation, faithfully reflecting the "hole" character of modern
man). The patriotic project is designed to remedy the "speech defect"
by producing the "true Austrian idea." Leinsdorf is quite suspicious
of such a project, though he wants to make use of it politically. He
suspects that too much reflection on the nature of the state cannot
help but subvert its taken-for-granted order. He is right, of course;
political loyalty based upon reflection on an idea is, by definition,
fragile and fugitive (Edmund Burke would certainly have sympa–
thized with Leinsdorf). Like all real conservatives, Leinsdorf relies
on intuitive certainties rather than intellectual conclusions. His
tragedy (and that of Austria-Hungary) is that modern man does not
come easily to intuitive certainties; more precisely, he dismantles, by
way of reflection, those certainties with which he had to begin.
Helmut Schelsky has called this modern propensity "permanent re–
flectiveness"
(Dauerreflektion);
it is as subversive of the political order
("critical consciousness-raising") as, in the mode of modern psy–
chology, it is subversive of the order of the self. Thus the patriotic
