Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
From Slow Like Wiki
For my purposes I include as Viennese in this book all those who were educated in the city and contributed to its intellectual achievements, even if they were not born there.
In 1867, the emperor proclaimed the December Constitution, which included a bill of rights guaranteeing equality before the law for all of the empire’s ethnicities, as well as freedomes of expression, religion and assembly. This was one of the most progressive documents of its time and is still in force today.
The Spanish Influenza killed Klimt and Egon Schiele.
Clemens von Pirquet, in 1906, coined the term « allergy » to describe hypersensitive reactions of immunological origin.
Eager to dissolve boundaries between biology and mathematics, psychology and art, sex and endocrinology, or mathematics and philosophy, the Viennes consequently sparked off. and delineated entirely new fields of study. They were not necessarily aiming to invent new disciplines, but that was nonetheless the natural result of their intellectual style.
Nothing was more odious to them than a hazy expression of presumed truths… Metaphysical depth raised in them a strong instinctive distrust even before logical analysis revealed that it was not depth that characterised such speculations, but emptiness of cognitive content.
Neurath workd on the pictorial representation of statistics, from which are descended infographics. His primary innovation was to show quantity by repetition rather than enlargement.
Gödel’s breakthrough ranks with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in terms of its transformational effect of mathematics, physics, and science more generally. He had dissolved in one fell swoop the rigid distinction between syntax and data.
Menger - Value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.
Margarete Lihotzky invents the fitted kitchen
Hedy Lamarr developed Spread Spectrum technology, the technology that led to BlueTooth, Wifi, and GPS.
Whereas Freudians believed in a chronological psychosexual development in five stages from the oral to the genital, Melanie Klein posited a psychic-position theory, whereby young children as they grew up oscillated between certain positions such as the paranoid-schizoid and depressive.
William Bateson and others merged Mendelian « genetics » with Darwin’s theory of natural selection to produce a solid account of evolutionary biology based on genetic inheritance, later called the « modern synthesis », or « central dogma » of evolution.
Socialist eugenics, sometimes called reform eugenics - By systematically planning for reproduction under the best social conditions, so went the utopia of the socialist eugenicists, a society of genetically and socially valuable humans could be created.
The first complete gender reassignment operation, from male to female, was carried out at the Institute for Sexual Science as early as 1931.
Hans Asperger was born just outside Vienna in 1906
Paul Frankl created « Skyscraper furniture », the first recognisably Modernist item to permeate the more fashionable American homes.
Hayek ‘s main point - the most influential he ever made - is that knowledge is too « dispersed » and « incomplete » in a modern society for even the self-appointed experts to plan. He called this the « hubris of reason ». He argued that the « scientific world view » of the logical positivists and the Machians had deluded people into believing that by applying their methodologies to the sphere of « human action », they had severely overreached themselves, straining the scientific method beyond its capabilities.
Popper proposed that only « piecemeal social engineering » was rationally possible, or desirable, as distinct from the large-scale utopian, societal engineering advocated by Neurath, the communists and fascists. In particular, Popper blames the Marxist theorising of his youth for central Europe’s collapse. « Instead of making history, historicists searched for inexorable historical laws, hoping to ride them. Instead of planning institutions, they prophesied the collapse of capitalism. This was a prescription for inaction. After each failure, socialists revised their interpretations. Meanwhile the Fascists acted.
In the end, only free societies could test policies in government until they were proved wrong (the falsification principle).
For Popper, some level of planned social change was possible, whereas Hayek increasingly believed that a full-blooded free-market system was the only way forward, and that any compromises between economic liberalism and collectivism, of the right or left, were impossible.
Voters had got used to seeing politics on a left-right axis for decades. The Viennese argued that it was now more realistic to look at politics on an individualist-collectivist axis, or liberal capitalism vs fascism/communism.
Schumpeter warned that creative destruction also made capitalism vulnerable to its ideological opponents, such as socialism. By contrast, he argued, the main virtue of capitalism, wealth creation was a long-haul process and often too subtle to readily appreciate. Its downsides - inequality, a monopolising tendency, occasional recessions, dislocations and resulting unemployment - were more conspicuous. In short, capitalism could be the victim of its very success.
Hayek argued that they had to be « concerned not so much with what would be immediately practicable, but with the beliefs which must regain ascendance if the dangers are to be averted which at the moment threaten individual freedom ».
For Polanyi, free-market capitalism had atomized societies and, if left to itself, the self-adjusting market would have « annihilated the human and natural substance of society ». Society had « taken measures to protect itself » - through social legislation, protectionist policies, corporatism, and eventually fascism and communism - which had endangered society even more. Polanyi famously called this dialectical cycle of capitalism and reaction the « double movement ».
In particular, the fundamental delusion of 19th C capitalism was to have treated human beings and nature (land) merely as commodities, to be bought and sold like cars or clothes; In fact, he argued, « according to the empirical definition of a commodity » they were obviously nothing of the kind; people and nature are specifically not produced for sale. Yet the market economy had subjected them to the same laws of supply and demand as everything else, leading, unsurprisingly, to a severe reaction.
Drucker invented management studies with « The Concept of the Corporation ».
Game theory argues that all social situations can be described in terms of coalitional games, and that all the range of possible outcomes in a game could be identified. These are solutions - a set of rules for each participant which tell him how to behave in every situation which may conceivably arise.
Eddy Bernays, Freud’s nephew, invented the public relations industry, moved advertising away from practical benefits to desire, was the first to enlist « experts » to endorse products and is the father of spin and fake news. The dramatic influence of the media was too important, he argued, to be left to the fascists who had destroyed his own city, or the communists. Democratic propaganda should be - needed to be - just as robust and sophisticated.
Herzog invented the focus group
Lazarsfeld invented the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer - two buttons - one for liking, and one for disliking, that a listener/viewer held and pushed while listening/watching a program.
Herzog interviewed listeners and newspaper reports on the 30 October 1938 broadcast of HG Wells « The War of the Worlds to produce « The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic » (1940).
Rather than people forming their opinions directly from reading or listening to the mass media, two-step flow described how information flowed first from the mass media to opinion-formers, such as journalists, and from them to the public.
In 1956, Gruen built the first shopping mall, Northland in Detroit. Four years later another 4,500 malls had been built in America alone.
The RAND (R and D) corporation worldview, including Mutually Assured Destruction, grew out of game theory and was satirized in Dr Strangelove.
In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse saw men and women as slaves to false needs superimposed on the individual by particular social interests… the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness and injuste, cause be radical empiricism and its application to all aspects of life, creating a « totalitarian universe of technological rationality », the RAND world, blocking all escape.
The task for neoliberals was to keep the nation but defang it, so as to allow the global market to function as one unit. Hence the turn to ways to strengthen the regulatory powers of global institutions in order to overrride national obstructions to global flows of trade, capital, and information.
The Uruguay Round of GATT trade negotiations, the most complex in history, which in 1995 brought 123 countries into a new era of free trade, complete with a robust new Dispute Settlement Body, was the nearest the world got to economic federalism in practice.
Under the dual economic pressures of the Vietnam war and funding the Great Society of his predecessor, Nixon ended the gold convertibility of the dollar in 1971; Most countries followed suit, moving to floating exchange rates, or at least controlled floats as in the various iterations of the European Monetary System.
Peter Drucker popularised the concept of the « knowledge economy, where the value of what is in your head is greater than that which you can do with your hands.
« We may designate as knowledge anything that is known by somebody.» The definition also included the production and distribution of knowledge. How to turn the fruits of knowledge into tangible monetised outcomes - products? This was the role of Schumpeter’s entrepreneur.
It is difficult to think of any intellectual movement since the Marxist-Leninists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that has reorientated political and economic thinking so profoundly. By the 1970s, the Austrian school offered an all-embracing vision of a new political economy that claimed to lift people out of poverty and product economic growth. They worked very much at an operational level, just as much as at a grand theoretical level, including successive chairs of the Federal Reserve.
The ascendancy of the Viennese brand of neoliberalism lasted from the mid-1970s to about 2010. The high water mark came in 2008 when total international trade peaked on the eve of the financial crash and subsequent recession of 2008-9. The crash led to the new popularism of Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orban. Brexit was another revolt against neoliberalism.
Polanyi: By incorporating fictitious commodities into market systems without protective measures, we run the risk of destroying the social and natural dimensions of our world. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin, promote Polanyi’s ideas, even if they have never read him.
Why did Nazism take root in Germany? One part may be the specific role of the genius in German literature and philosophy - the over-exalted personality directed solely by his own visions and intuitions. The school of thought that is the antithesis to the politics of genius is critical rationalism.
The lives and concerns of ordinary people was their primary evidence - Kant’s « crooked timber of mankind ». They were Druckerian knowledge workers, applying the latest academically developed ideas to the full praxis of societies, from applying philosphy to everyday language to applying modern psychology to the appreciation of art, from applying Taylorism to the kitchen and the theory of atomic fission to nuclear weapons
Surely Hayek was correct to argue that the hallmark of contemporary society is the decentralisation, or dispersal, of knowledge, implying that the best decision-making is made by those with local knowledge, rather than central planners, however many degrees they might possess.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales was inspired by Hayek’s work.
« These artificial categories »
Viennese Books
The Analysis of Sensations (1886) - Ernst Mach - the ego was « not a definite, unalterable, sharply-bounded unity’, but rather a bundle of sense impressions of the world »
Man’s Search for Meaning - (1946) Viktor Frankel
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) - Willhelm Reich
The Authoritarian Personality (1950) - Adorno et al
An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927) - Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) - Anna Freud
The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) - Arthur Koestler
Art and Illusion - Ernst Gombrich
The Story of Art (1950) - Ernst Gombrich
Advanced Inorganic Chemistry (1962) - Geoffrey Wilkinson and F Allen Cotton
The Road to Serfdom (1944) - Hayek
The Great Transformation (1944) - Karl Polanyi
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) - Karl Popper
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) - Joseph Schumpeter
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
The End of Economic Man (1939) - Drucker
The Future of Industrial Man - Drucker
Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations - Bruno Bettelheim
