Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

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 ».

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