The world in the association : liberal practice in 19th-century Habsburg Central Europe

Abstract

For some years now the problem of liberalism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, its character, its relative strength or weakness, its origins and its legacies, has not been a subject of much discussion or research. In the 1980s and 1990s, when this topic dominated debates among historians of Germany, it was also taken up by some historians of Habsburg Central Europe. Carl E. Schorske’s famous thesis of 1980, that a failure of political liberalism in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy had inadvertently produced the remarkable cultural production among the alienated sons of the bourgeoisie in turn-of-the-century Vienna, implicitly raised the question of liberalism in the region. Schorske’s thesis implied not only that liberal political parties had suffered defeat by populist and nationalist ones in late nineteenth-century Austria, but also that it had been exceptionally weak and out-of-place in the society of the Habsburg Monarchy in the first place. Was liberalism indeed so weak in the Habsburg Monarchy of the nineteenth century? Did its failure simply reflect what was then called the economic or social “backwardness” of the region? Was liberal thought in Austria merely a pale reflection or copy of the foreign British or French liberal ideas adopted by a small elite in Europe further to the East? Were developments in Vienna typical for the entire empire?