Richard Cockett, „Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World“
How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West’s intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?
Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.
The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact.
Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna’s rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I A Viennese Education: The Rational and Anti-Rational
1. Growing up Viennese: An Education in Liberalism
2. Black Vienna and the Birth of Populist Politics
Part II The Rise and Fall of Red Vienna
3. The New Human
4. Fresh Thinking for a New Era: The Birth of the Knowledge Economy
5. The Muse Has Had Enough: The Feminism and Socialism
6. The War on Science and the End of Vienna
Part III Emigrants and Exiles
7. Awake, Slumbering Giant! The Viennese Discover of America
8. The Balm of Muddle: The Viennese in Britain
9. The World Reimagined: War Work and the Open Society
10. Sex, Shopping and the Sovereign Customer
11. A Viennese Apotheosis: The Ascent of the Austrian School
Conclusion: The Politics of Genus versus the Empire of Critical Rationalism
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Richard Cockett is a historian and journalist and a staff correspondent and senior editor at The Economist. He is the author of seven books and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Yale University Press
464 Pages
November 2023