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THE CULTURE OF VIENNESE SCIENCE AND THE RIDDLE OF AUSTRIAN LIBERALISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN
MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Duke University E-mail: mhacohen@duke.edu
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Extract

Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though the scientific accomplishments of Viennese scientists were, and recognized by numerous Nobel prizes, they alone do not account for the historians' interest. Rather, Vienna's culture of science was imbedded in broader humanistic visions and invested in political and educational projects of major historical significance. Viennese philosophy placed humanity's hopes in science and articulated its historical ramifications to the public, drawing out the political implications of competing scientific methodologies and tying them to dramatic historical events. This philosophy of science still reverberates nowadays in debates on liberty, markets, and government that quickly reveal their underpinning in the methodology of science. Vienna's scientific culture, it seems, has never ceased to capture the imagination, far beyond Austria.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 369 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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17 John Beatty has written (email to author, 29 Sept. 2008): “Probabilistic laws do not really solve problems of determinism vs. freedom . . . If alleged laws of societal development, or the course of human history, were probabilistic, one might still feel very uncomfortable about the odds of things turning out for the worse.” Indeed. After World War I, the Exners felt exceedingly uncomfortable about the odds. But the problem continued to be debated in these terms at least throughout the interwar years.

18 The episode is recounted in detail in Michael Stoeltzner, “Franz Serafin Exner's Indeterminist Theory of Culture”, Physics in Perspective 4 (2002), 267–319. Responding to German historical relativism and determinism, Exner sought to rescue a glimmer of hope for liberal culture.

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22 Popper, The Open Society, 2: 48. For Arendt see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1958), 267–302: “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”

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28 Victor Adler (1852–1918) was the leader of Austrian Social Democracy.