ROBERT S. WISTRICH
Jewish Intellectuals and Mass Politics
in
Fin-de-Siecle
Vienna
Fill-de-siecle
Vienna, it is widely acknowledged, was at one and the same
time the scene of one of the most seminal intellectual revolutions that
ushered in the twentieth century, and a city that felt more acutely than
most the tremors of imminent social and political disintegration. Here,
perhaps sooner than anywhere else, intellectuals had to confront the
implications of the fragmentation of European high culture and the
challenge of irrationalism expressed in the rise of a new, more strident
style of mass politics that threatened the very existence of the institu–
tional and social order in which they lived. Part of the fascination this
period now exerts on contemporaries is no doubt linked to the innova–
tive responses that the Viennese intelligentsia developed in the face of this
challenge. At the same time, one recognizes, in the mood of pessimism,
defensiveness, and even powerlessness that gripped many of the Viennese
intellectuals, analogies with the confusion of our own times, with its
breakdown of old certainties, established ideologies, traditional
paradigms of social thought, and received norms of behavior.
The crisis of liberal rationalism occurred earlier and more dramati–
cally in Vienna than it did elsewhere in Western Europe . Here, the
fragility of liberal "modernity" - bourgeois, capitalist, legalist, and ratio–
nalist - was exposed with a sharpness and at times a brutality that cast
into doubt its fundamental premises and presuppositions about the nature
of the individual and his place in society.
It
has been persuasively argued
that in
fin-de-siecle
Vienna, it was essentially
political
frustrations, emerging
out of the crisis of liberal culture, that led to the discovery of that
"dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man," as Carl Schorske
put it - a creature moved more by feeling and instinct than by abstract
reason. With the rise of mass parties in the 1880s that would successfully
challenge the liberal hegemony - Pan-Germans, Slavic nationalists, Social
Democrats, and above all the anti-Semitic Christian-Social Party led by
Karl Lueger - the antiliberal tide seemed irresistible. By 1895, Vienna had
been conquered by a mass movement from below, whose guiding princi–
ples, anti-Semitism, clericalism, and municipal socialism, were the direct
antithesis of classical liberal teaching. By the turn of the century, liberal
