The states of the world are either national states, i.e. states in which a single language dominates, or multinational states, i.e. states in which multiple languages dominate. The overwhelming majority of states, including Austria, belong to the latter category, the former representing only a vanishing minority. Nevertheless, in the literature on constitutional law, the national state is often presented as the normal case, the multinational state as the abnormal.
———Ludwig Gumplowicz, Austrian Constitutional Law, 1907[1891]Footnote 1Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary reconsideration of the question of political modernity. The once widely held belief in the inevitability, and to a certain extent desirability, of a world order based on sovereign nation-states has given way to a more critical perspective on the historical contingency and analytical usefulness of our model of “modern” statehood.Footnote 2 This new perspective has fueled a successful effort to recover the “modernity” of Europe's landed empires—Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire—and trace the long afterlives of imperial sovereignty.Footnote 3 It has also launched a series of critical investigations into the social sciences and the role these disciplines played in defining and legitimizing prevailing concepts of “nation,” “state,” and “empire.”Footnote 4 Historians and social scientists have drawn attention to anthropology and sociology's complicity in nation-building and nationalist-imperialist projects, while postcolonial scholars have focused on the Eurocentric teleologies that structure(d) social scientific research.Footnote 5
Liberated from the modernist, nation-centric perspective of early generations of scholars, we now appreciate the vitality and long-term viability of Europe's continental empires. Yet the question remains: If the “empires,” that is, non-national states, of the nineteenth century were modern, what then was the theoretical foundation, the philosophy of statehood, on which these states rested? How, if at all, did they justify their existence and rationalize themselves in the face of this new normative political, legal, and social scientific discourse?Footnote 6 In Western Europe, scholars increasingly tended to deny the possibility of political modernity to composite states such as Austria.Footnote 7 Social science, born out of and conceptually dependent on legal philosophy, began to construct a binary opposition between “normal” unitary nation-states and “abnormal” composite “empires.”Footnote 8 After the First World War and the collapse of Europe's dynastic empires, the backwardness of non-national states would quickly become a matter of scientific dogma.Footnote 9 Further to the east, however, the study of society yielded a radically different conclusion about the nature and future of empire, one that united thinkers from Europe's geographic and social margins in a common defense of multinational statehood. A century before the “imperial turn,” social scientists from the Habsburg Monarchy articulated an influential, if now forgotten critique of the nation-centric legal philosophy that was beginning to threaten the very existence of multinational empires. Austrian intellectuals grappled with the analytical distinction between nations and empires and asserted that continental empires were both modern and viable.
Recent work has emphasized the responsiveness of the Habsburg state to social challenges and its unique ability to accommodate ethnic and religious difference.Footnote 10 In addition, a rich literature has developed in recent years on the attachment Habsburg subjects felt to the Emperor and the abstract “Empire,” Pieter Judson's ambitious new history of the Monarchy representing the culmination of much of this research.Footnote 11 Yet, despite these positive trends and the limited success of nationalization campaigns, Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire were beginning to be categorized at this time as “empires,” as polities fundamentally different from the self-described “nation-states” to their west.Footnote 12 Multinational states faced, it is clear, not a problem of public morale or subjective attachment to the ruling family and its institutions, but a problem of legal self-definition.Footnote 13 Although it is certainly true, in the case of Austria, that the powerful cult surrounding the figure of Emperor Francis Joseph served a legitimating function, this practice of identity-building neither addressed nor fundamentally resolved the complex legal questions being raised about the place of multinational empires in a new global order (conceptually) based on the nation-state.Footnote 14 Confronted by the logic of national sovereignty, Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire struggled to articulate explanations for their continued existence concordant with the prevailing juridical and social scientific concepts of the era.Footnote 15
In this article, I argue that the Dual Monarchy did in fact produce a useable concept of statehood, one rooted in the emerging field of sociology and its scientific justifications for multiethnic empire. In the late 1880s, a group of scholars, many of them members of religious and ethnic minority groups, began to reject the theoretical assumptions of contemporary legal studies, resulting in a shift away from mainstream constitutional law and toward a self-described “sociological” approach to the study of the state. The conflict between proponents and critics of this approach played out primarily in debates about the “law and political science” (Rechts- und Staatswissenschaft) curriculum, which served as the basic academic training for the Monarchy's jurists and administrators and represented, these scholars believed, the key to propagating and entrenching a correct understanding of the Austrian state. Explicitly formulated for the first time in the title of a widely discussed published lecture delivered by the Polish-Jewish sociologist Ludwig (Ludwik) Gumplowicz (1838–1909) in Graz in 1892, this new concept—dubbed the soziologische Staatsidee, “sociological idea of the state”—came to function as a guiding framework for a number of Austrian statesmen, politicians, and academics, including the future President of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937), who used a variant of the term during an 1892 parliamentary debate on the issue of curricular reform.Footnote 16
This article will begin by outlining what contemporaries understood to be the intellectual and political stakes of legal education for Europe's multiethnic empires, before turning to scholarly and parliamentary debates on curricular reform and to Masaryk and Gumplowicz's pedagogical proposals. Two decades before he would call for the creation of a Czechoslovak nation-state, Masaryk offered a sociological critique of the then dominant logic of national “historic rights,” which he saw as an impractical, and, more fundamentally, philosophically impoverished solution to the so-called Nationalities Question.Footnote 17 Introducing a mandatory course in the “theory of society” would, he argued, prove to the Monarchy's future jurists that Austria's social conflicts represented wholly typical, rather than abnormal, manifestations of political modernization. Entering into these debates in his published works, Gumplowicz sketched a history of the rise of the nationalist state-idea and its effect on the domestic and international perception of the Habsburg state's legitimacy. He dismissed this idea of the state as a “Europe-centric” myth based in ideology rather than sociological fact, and claimed that the state, as the product of social conflict, could never truly fulfill the idea of national solidarity espoused by liberal nationalists.Footnote 18 Class and nationality, he insisted, were but two superficially distinct expressions of the same social phenomenon; the allegedly unnatural Monarchy and Western Europe's nation-states thus could, and should, be seen as analytically comparable entities, not radically opposed “modern” and “premodern” political forms. Masaryk and Gumplowicz developed an alternative sociology that rehabilitated multiethnic statehood and fought to integrate this scientific approach into the Monarchy's legal curriculum, seeing this as the most effective means of countering the ongoing discursive construction of “empires” as abnormal states.
The articulation and partial institutionalization of the sociological idea of the state allows us to track the diffusion of the European categories of social scientific and legal analysis in the “first era of globalization” and offers us a window onto an intellectual and political movement that, until recently, went largely unnoticed in historical scholarship: the intra- and inter-imperial efforts around the turn of the twentieth century to scientifically challenge the rise of a normative vision of political modernity premised on national sovereignty. While it may be true that “empire never became one of the basic concepts of modernity,” or modernity as it was constituted after 1918–1919, it would be a mistake to conclude that such a concept was never elaborated, or that the desire to demarcate and reinforce the (imperial) nation-state was the sole political impulse propelling the development of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 19 Were it not for the contingent events of the First World War, this body of thought might well have endured into the twentieth century, and many of its central tenets would not have needed to be discovered by contemporary scholars of empire.
GERMAN LEGAL THOUGHT AND THE HABSBURG MONARCHY'S CRISIS OF SELF-DEFINITION
Like other multiethnic states, the Habsburg Monarchy found itself at a crossroads as the nineteenth century came to a close.Footnote 20 The German Liberal (Deutschliberale) Party, also known as the Constitutional Party, which held the reins of power from 1867 to 1879, had sought, unsuccessfully, to transform the Austrian half of the Monarchy into a German-dominated centralized state.Footnote 21 This program, coupled with their opposition to the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, brought them into conflict with conservative and non-German bourgeois nationalist parties, as well as with the Emperor Francis Joseph, leading to a political stalemate and, eventually, the collapse of their government. In 1879, Count Eduard Taaffe engineered a new coalition of clerical and conservative factions who shared a more traditional, dynastic understanding of the Monarchy. By 1897, this government had also proved itself unable to govern, and for the next two decades a series of Christian Socials, German nationalists, liberals, and conservatives rotated in and out of power in the Imperial Council. Thanks in part to the efforts of various “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” national identity was starting to exercise a larger (though certainly not hegemonic) influence on the political sphere during this period.Footnote 22 It became increasingly clear that the Monarchy could no longer ignore nationalist claims or speak of itself in the uni-national or pre-national idioms of earlier generations. Austrian scholars concluded that the Monarchy had to find a concept of statehood that could compete with that of Europe's nation-states, whose historical development was beginning to serve as the master narrative of academic inquiry at the time.
Austria's transformation into a functioning multiethnic state defied the theoretical assumptions of Europe's dominant legal and social scientific discourse, and yet little attention has been paid to contemporary interpretations of and reflections on the validity of these assumptions.Footnote 23 How did Habsburg thinkers interpret this successful negotiation of difference and bring their observations to bear on the emerging nation-centric discourse on the state? While the project of theorizing multinational statehood is today often associated with the Austromarxists, the earliest theoretical elaborations of this project were published not by socialist authors, such as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, but by members of the Monarchy's “Law and Political Science” faculties, who in the 1880s began to ground their justifications for the multinational Habsburg state in the nascent discipline of sociology.Footnote 24 Upon initial consideration, Austria's early embrace of a self-consciously “sociological” political science might strike the historian of modern Europe as a strange, somewhat implausible phenomenon. After all, sociology, our standard histories of the discipline tell us, first came into being farther to the west, in France and Germany; instrumental to the theorization of and political justification for the French and German nation and empire-building projects, it was the product of a particular set of political, social, and economic factors, many of which did not obtain in the supposedly semi-feudal, economically underdeveloped, and inward-looking space that was the Habsburg Monarchy. For these reasons, Austria, one might assume, failed to produce a sociological thinker of the same caliber and influence as Durkheim, Weber, or Simmel. Tellingly, a recent volume on sociology and imperialism included chapters devoted to nearly every major national-imperial context, neglecting only Habsburg Austria.Footnote 25
Yet this assessment neglects to consider the international renown and prestige Austrian sociology enjoyed during the early years of the discipline (the 1860s to 1890s). In the decades before the First World War, educated audiences in Western Europe and North America tended to associate the Empire not with decadence and decline, but with scholastic achievement, including in the emerging field of sociology.Footnote 26 Austrian sociology can be said to have developed simultaneously with the French and German versions of the discipline, but its tendencies, motivations, and research interests were of a distinct character. Around the turn of the twentieth century, overlapping sociological discourses coexisted in Europe's globalizing public sphere; if the sociologies of Durkheim quietly posited the modernity and normality of the nation-state, and Weber and German political science loudly proclaimed it, scholars in the Habsburg Monarchy came to reject these assumptions, interrogating the analytical usefulness of contemporary political categories through what they described as a “sociological” approach to the state.Footnote 27
Between 1871 and 1892—the year in which the Austrian Imperial Council formally debated the proposed introduction of sociology as a mandatory course of study in the Monarchy's law and political science faculties—Austria witnessed a blossoming of sociological literature. In 1871, the bilingual Czech-German Bohemian Gustav Adolf Lindner published Ideen zur Psychologie der Gesellschaft als Grundlage der Sozialwissenschaft (Ideas on the psychology of society as the basis of social science), which according to the historian of sociology Earl Edward Eubank, “preceded the most important sociological writings of Herbert Spencer, Lester F. Ward, and Gabriel Tarde,” and thus represents one of the “earliest sociological treatises in any language.”Footnote 28 Several years later, Lindner's future colleague Tomáš Masaryk completed his Habilitationsschrift on modern suicide, which initially bore the title “Über die Prinzipien der Soziologie” (On the principles of sociology).Footnote 29 At around the same time, Ludwig Gumplowicz began to publish on sociological methods and the sociological approach to the study of the state, making a name for himself in the international scholarly community.Footnote 30 By the end of the nineteenth century, Austrian scholars had pioneered a variety of social scientific fields, including the sociology of law and education. The Galician Carl Menger (1840–1921) applied sociological methods to the study of economic phenomena, while the Moravian-German-Jewish philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) laid the groundwork for the sociology of knowledge. Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922) began publishing on the sociology of law while a student in the 1880s, and eventually established a seminar for “living law” (lebendes Recht) in Czernowitz in 1910.
These internationally prominent scholars shared not only a common conceptual language, but similar backgrounds and political interests. None of these important figures in early Austrian sociology was born in Vienna, and, while most of them studied at some point in the imperial capital, they all spent a significant portion of their adult lives in contested multiethnic spaces. Absent from their work is the reflexive sympathy for German (cultural) nationalism that we find among more prominent, and generationally somewhat younger Viennese social theorists of the Marxist tradition. Collectively, they can be said to constitute one of two scholarly camps that formed in the final decades of the Habsburg Monarchy to critique the emerging trend of methodological nationalism from a non-Marxist perspective. This camp united secular liberals from ethnolinguistically mixed areas, many of them Jews or self-identifying members of historically disenfranchised groups, while the other brought together Catholic conservatives who feared the anticlerical policies and secular outlook of bourgeois nationalism.Footnote 31 If the Marxist and Catholic schools of Habsburg sociology are today better known, it remains the case that the Monarchy's most internationally renowned and influential social theorists belonged to the liberal, pro-imperial camp.
Austria, it is clear, offered extremely fertile ground for the development of sociological theory, and in the years from 1871 to 1892 a unique sociological discourse on law, statehood, and politics emerged. This discourse arose in response not to other schools of sociology—there hardly were any distinct “schools” to speak of in the 1890s—but to mainstream German legal and political science. The adjective “sociological,” as it was used by the scholars mentioned above, had a polemical connotation, and referred to a particular set of theoretical premises regarding the nature of the “state” and its relationship to the “people.” The advent of the nationalist idea in the post-Napoleonic era added a new dimension to what had, up to that point, been a contained legal debate about the proper relationship between centralizing states and established estates and corporations. The law became “ethnicized,” and with that, questions of state legitimacy, once articulated in the universalistic language of natural law theories, began to be informed by historicist, psychological, and biological theories of nationality.Footnote 32
At the forefront of the ethnicizing trend were some of the leading figures of Central European constitutional and international law. Perhaps the most cited and best-respected legal expert of this period was the Swiss-born Johann Caspar Bluntschli (1808–1881). Bluntschli's theory of the state rested on a gendered distinction between so-called “passive” and “active” peoples (Völker).Footnote 33 “Only those nations,” he declared, “in which the masculine soul dominates have the power of spirit and character needed to create and sustain a national state.”Footnote 34 Nations “of a more feminine character,” such as the Latin, Celtic, and Slavic nations, “are always ruled over by other powers that are superior to them.”Footnote 35 While not all national states (Nationalstaaten) could claim total ethnic homogeneity—here he mentioned the presence of Danes and Poles in the German Reich—it was the case, he claimed, that national states, or rather the “head nation” (Hauptvolk) on which the national state was built, possessed the right to assimilate their national minorities.Footnote 36 Lacking a “head nation” due to the failure of previous Germanization campaigns, Austria survived by playing its constituent provinces (here referred to as states) off one another in a complicated balancing act.Footnote 37 The difficulties involved in such a “mechanical” method of “violent unification” had become, however, all too clear following 1848 and the introduction of the Basic Law of 1861, for such an approach to multinationalism only operated effectively, Bluntschli maintained, in an anachronistic “absolutist state.” The “injured nationalities” that had suffered under Austrian rule were now, in the era of constitutionalism, beginning to “fly asunder.”Footnote 38
Perhaps the second most influential jurist of the mid-nineteenth century was Georg Beseler (1809–1888), whose ideas provided the framework for German liberal demands in 1848. Beseler, a champion of the Germanist Historical School, advanced the idea that the people (Volk) maintained a law that was distinct from the law of jurists, that is, Roman Law, the introduction of which in the early modern period had stunted the organic development of German legal philosophy and hindered, so the argument went, the emergence of a German nation-state.Footnote 39 At the Frankfurt Parliament, the Germanist project would receive an official endorsement through the elevation of Robert von Mohl (1799–1875) to the position of Justice Minister. In the four years before his death, Mohl set himself to the task of legally defining the nature of the newly established German Empire. After an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between member states and the imperial government in Berlin, he concluded that Germany constituted a “federal state” (Bundesstaat) rather than a mere “association of states” (Staatenbund), and thus should be regarded as a single, indivisible entity in international law (Völkerrecht).Footnote 40 In this respect, Germany differed fundamentally from the then-only-seven-year-old Dual Monarchy, whose new constitution represented, he argued, a degeneration of the centralized Empire into a mere personal union (Personalunion) of two states.Footnote 41 A personal union, he made clear, was legally constituted by international law—international legal agreements between sovereign legal personalities—rather than by constitutional law.Footnote 42 A key distinction was thus being made at this time between those states that had transcended international law and reconstituted themselves as indivisible legal personalities and those states that were still subject to it. Increasingly, this distinction would be deployed to justify outside engagement on behalf of supposedly sovereign constituents of Europe's landed “empires,” such as the Balkan nations living under Ottoman rule.Footnote 43
With the founding of a unified German state in 1871, German legal experts began to distinguish between so-called modern and premodern empires (Reiche). In 1879, the prominent constitutional scholar Josef von Held (1815–1890) published Das Kaiserthum als Rechtsbegriff (Empire/emperorship as a legal concept), a historical exploration of the “imperial idea” since antiquity.Footnote 44 “Modern” empire referred, in his highly normative and teleological assessment, to a nation that had reached the endpoint of its development, securing for itself a position on the international stage through a decision to constitute itself as a unitary state (Einheitsstaat). This positively defined “empire” corresponded to the new “empires” of the 1870s, the new nation-states of Germany and Italy, and the expanding nation-states of Britain and France. Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire diverged from this definition of “modern empire” in several important respects. Russia remained a “medieval” empire, a theocratic state whose imperial identity rested on the Tsar's role as leader of the “one true church.”Footnote 45 Similarly, the Ottoman Sultan had not yet transcended his role as Caliph and renounced the pretensions to “world dominance” associated with this title.Footnote 46 Austria could be classified as neither a medieval nor a modern empire. Unlike a medieval empire, it had long renounced its claims to universal rule. Its recent move toward decentralization and lack of a unitary “cultural element” (Kulturelement) defied, however, the historical trajectory of modern empires.Footnote 47
“LEGAL-HISTORICAL STUDIES” AND CALLS FOR CURRICULAR REFORM
It is important to recognize that idea of the state developed by Bluntschli, Mohl, Held, and others had not yet become hegemonic in Europe, and that this new, “scientific” discourse competed with a variety of pre-existing conceptual traditions. As historians and sociologists have noted, how France understood itself as a nation and a state historically differed in fundamental respects from German or British or Italian self-conceptions.Footnote 48 We now recognize, however, that a number of common features undergirded these national(ist) ideas of the state.Footnote 49 Beginning around 1840, political science and the allied fields of constitutional and international law increasingly viewed the “modern” state not simply as a legal fiction, but as a real, living personality with a unique genius and individuality that transcended the sovereign.Footnote 50 This unique genius was assumed to correspond to a principle nationality, which was to be represented on the world stage as an indivisible personality in international law. Furthermore, a certain teleology of political development could, it was claimed, be discerned through inductive historical research. The supposed lack of historically progressing and outwardly expanding principal nation led to a “downgrading” of states such as Austria and Russia to the status of “ancient” empires. While this conceptual paradigm emerged in German-speaking Central Europe, it quickly came to exercise an enormous influence throughout the continent and around the world and was identified by contemporaries as the basis of modern political and legal philosophy.Footnote 51
Time and again, Gumplowicz, Masaryk, and other Austrian scholars would identify German constitutional law's conceptual categories as weapons in the war on Austrian legitimacy in particular, and multiethnic statehood in general. Habsburg sociology sought through its critiques to make mainstream constitutional law's mostly implicit concepts of statehood explicit, to reveal the political motivations behind these concepts of the state and warn of its consequences for the Habsburg Monarchy. Rather than reinforce the binary opposition between “nations,” that is, centralized, unitary, sovereign states, and “empires,” that is, multinational states, that was coming into being at this time, scholars in Austria instead stressed the equivalence, or in certain cases irrelevance, of “nation-state” and “empire” as analytical categories.Footnote 52 It was a counter-project built around the attempt to articulate and cement in European public consciousness a new and more pluralistic idea of the state.
It was only natural, then, that Austria's “Law and Political Science” faculties became the main arenas in which this conflict between the historicist-organicist and sociological schools played out.Footnote 53 When in 1886 the Minister of Religion and Education Paul Gautsch von Frankenthurn solicited recommendations from Austria's law faculties concerning the reform of the official, empire-wide curriculum for law students, several of these self-described sociologists discovered a very real opportunity to both bring their expertise to bear on political discussions and assert the legitimacy of their fledgling discipline. Some penned editorials in newspapers and others actively involved themselves in parliamentary and ministerial debates. The reform of the Monarchy's curriculum for law students thus quickly became the object of a vigorous debate about much more than coursework and examinations. The deliberative spaces opened up by the prospect of reform served as forums in which to debate the future of multinational empires in the “modern” world, both from an abstract and from a specifically Austrian perspective.
Almost every scholar, jurist, and policy advisor who took part in the ongoing debate concerning the reform of legal education agreed on one important point: the philosophical basis of the existing curriculum, introduced in the 1850s by Count Leo Thun-Hohenstein, no longer corresponded to Austria's unique social and political circumstances. “German Legal and Imperial History” (Deutsche Rechts- und Reichsgeschichte) lay at the heart of Thun-Hohenstein's curriculum, replacing the previous seminars in the philosophy of natural law.Footnote 54 Thun appears to have associated natural law with Rousseauian social contract theory and the French Revolution, and was convinced that the historicist approach would inculcate “conservative,” pro-Monarchical values in Austria's youth, despite the fact that the leaders of the German Historical School of Law participated actively in the 1848 Revolution.Footnote 55 His new curriculum not only paved the way for the introduction of (German) liberal-nationalist thought into Austrian jurisprudence, but also, contemporaries commented, subverted the “Greater Austrian Idea” he was specifically charged with promoting.Footnote 56
In 1887, the Ministry of Education published in a single volume the advisory opinions (Gutachten) of various legal scholars and professional jurists, who, the previous year, had been solicited to provide input on the existing program of study and propose reforms.Footnote 57 The opinions included in this volume show that only a small minority of those asked believed that the current emphasis on the history of Roman, German, and Church law ought to be fully maintained. Among those who in general supported the historical approach to legal education, the idea of an obligatory course on Austrian imperial and legal history (österreichische Rechts- und Reichsgeschichte) enjoyed considerable popularity. In their report to the Ministry, several members of the conservative Vienna Law Faculty acknowledged the deficiencies of the 1855 curriculum and expressed support for the introduction of more “imperial history.”Footnote 58 The German-language University of Graz, while generally opposed to significant reforms, noted that a large minority contingent of the local professorate, including, we may assume, Gumplowicz, favored “radical” changes to the curriculum and thus refused to attach their names to the faculty's official report to the Ministry.Footnote 59 The scholars associated with this more radical faction, which included Arnold Luschin-Ebengreuth, the doyen of “Austrian Imperial History,” was of the view that the study of “systems of power,” not “the discovery of diplomatic documents” and “description of wartime events,” should lie at the heart of the curriculum.Footnote 60
Experts in non-German legal traditions, such as Polish and Bohemian law, were particularly enthusiastic about the possible introduction of Austrian legal history as a required field. In their official report to the Ministry of Education, the Law Faculty of the recently established (1882) Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague recommended, among things, reducing the number of hours devoted to legal history and establishing new chairs in the “particular laws and histories of individual provinces.”Footnote 61 Speaking before the House of Deputies in 1892, Josef Herold, a member of the Young Czech Party, portrayed the question of Austria's law curriculum to be a matter of both great scholarly and political importance; in fact, the scholarly and the political were, he argued, inseparable. Introducing a course in “Austrian Imperial and Legal History,” one in which German and Bohemian legal traditions received equal scholarly attention promised, in his view, to correct the youth's mistaken understanding of the Austrian state.Footnote 62 Such an endorsement of a new kind of Austrian legal history could not, he added, be dismissed as the fringe position of Czech nationalists, who for several decades had lamented the alleged abuse of the Bohemian Staatsrecht (constitutional law). The majority of law faculties in the Empire, he correctly pointed out, had come out in favor of similar measures in the above-mentioned 1887 report, and his position matched that of a significant number of delegates. A Slovenian delegate declared, much along the same lines, that the existing program of study had to be “Austrianized” (verösterreichert).Footnote 63 This meant replacing the current course in German history with a course in Austrian Imperial and Legal History and making lectures in particular (non-German) legal traditions more widely available.
Proponents of Austrian Imperial and Legal History couched their project in terms of a comparative philosophical investigation into the practice of law. They recommended a course in the “philosophy of law,” which would consist of a comparative introduction to German, and, where applicable, locally operating non-German legal codes. What was more important, a Polish delegate remarked, was the “development of the idea of law in all times, among all peoples” and “changes to legal institutions under the influence of diverse civilizing factors.”Footnote 64 He therefore encouraged the Ministry to consider replacing lectures on the history of German and Canon Law with a more theoretical course of study, “a general lecture on the history of law.”Footnote 65
MASARYK AND THE “EXTREME ORDINARINESS” OF THE MONARCHY
By the final decade of the nineteenth century, the idea of the state that had been cemented in the Austrian curriculum in the 1850s was under siege. Making use of the conceptual infrastructure provided by emerging social scientific fields, a critical mass of scholars, lawyers, and politicians advanced an argument about both the philosophical poverty and negative political consequences of the historicist approach to legal education. In a speech to parliament, Tomáš Masaryk, one of the Monarchy's leading representatives of the newly established discipline of sociology, articulated a radical form of this argument. Masaryk opened his address with a call to fundamentally reform, and not simply alter, the existing course of study for law students. He minced no words: the history of law, while a legitimate and productive intellectual pursuit, failed to provide students with the education they needed in order to properly understand the Austrian state and practice Austrian law. A genuine reform was necessary, one that would bring the curriculum, and with it the “state idea,” in line with what sociology had determined to be the modern function of the state.
The forty years since Thun-Hohenstein's reforms had demonstrated, according to Masaryk, that the state was “socializing itself,” becoming an arena in which more and more individuals, and more and more groups, participated.Footnote 66 “One no longer finds the greatness of a state,” he remarked, “in the laurels it wins on the battlefield; one looks for it in the fulfillment of its internal life,” in the “greatest possible development of its citizens.”Footnote 67 The purpose of the state, and the laws that governed its development, were thus “social.” Its ultimate duty was to acknowledge the needs and interests of its individual constituents, and to foster and harness their creative capacities.Footnote 68 Masaryk understood the claims about the nature and objectives of the state not as primarily ethical statements, but as empirically established, scientific facts; sociology, as the discipline that yielded these newly recognized facts, lay at the very center of legal scholarship and political science. “Our jurists should learn in their studies to conceive of the state and its tasks in this way,” that is, to think of the law and the state from the perspective of “sociological principles.”Footnote 69
But what exactly were these “sociological principles”? Rather than teach students what the law and the state historically were (the historicists’ approach), or what they should be (the Hegelians’ approach, in their view), the new curriculum, Masaryk stated, had to be grounded in a “comparative” approach to the study of “legal conditions” across time and space.Footnote 70 Sociology, a discipline devoted, according to Masaryk, to the comparative study of the development of society, offered the key to properly understanding these various local developments in the law and to synthesizing the past—what the law was—with the present—what the law currently is or should be.Footnote 71 This, he went on to argue, was what “the spirit of the political and social sciences should be,” the spirit which “jurists in Austria should fulfill.”Footnote 72 Though he “welcomed” the proposed addition of a course in “Austrian Imperial and Legal History” or “General and Austrian Constitutional Law,” he felt this supplementary element amounted to little more than an “augmentation of the instructional content” of the existing curriculum, not a “real reform.”Footnote 73 These additions to the curriculum should be viewed “as the beginning, and only the beginning” of a much broader reconceptualization of the objectives and methods of legal education.
Masaryk was well aware that such a sweeping reform of the established pedagogical order would have an effect on the way students understood their state, and knew that his proposals would be interpreted as part of a conspiracy to delegitimize the notions of dynastic loyalism on which the Habsburg “state idea” had traditionally been based. Taking aim at those who wished to reduce the Austrian state idea to a vision of a Habsburg-led, German-dominated Central Europe, Masaryk declared the true Austrian state idea to be the “coordination of all national and state forces.”Footnote 74 Attempts to impose linguistic and cultural uniformity on the Monarchy's social landscape and to “subordinate” non-German groups to the German-Austrian state idea were not the solution. “Austria's unity,” he replied, “must come into being through the full development of its various forces.”Footnote 75 “The Austrian state idea cannot,” he concluded, “be about imposing some kind of uniformity,” but instead must aim for “community,… social rights … and the building up and developing of the state.”Footnote 76
For Masaryk, the state idea of cooperation and pluralism amounted to more than a mere political slogan; grounded in what the science of sociology determined to be the political and social realities of the Austrian state, this new idea of the state naturalized the Monarchy's perceived deficiencies and recast them as part of a more general evolutionary process. It is not “arbitrarily,” he told his audience during a later session of parliament that the notion of “social transformation” triggered in their minds thoughts of Austria. The Monarchy, he asserted, was experiencing the same kind of “socialization” of the political sphere being observed elsewhere in the world.Footnote 77 Owing, however, to the “diversity” of political entities that comprised the Empire, the successful completion of this process of social transformation was proving “difficult.”Footnote 78 He concluded from this fact not that the Monarchy was abnormal, but instead, somewhat paradoxically, that it was exceptionally representative of the nature of European modernity and modernization. The formation of the “social state” was thus both the “Austrian problem” and the “problem of the era,” the primary dilemma facing the modern state.Footnote 79 Here Masaryk anticipated, by more than a century, the conclusion drawn by many leading Habsburg historians: that the “Empire” was “extreme in its ordinariness,” its internal ethnic and religious diversity distinguishing it from the European norm only in degree rather than in kind.Footnote 80 While primarily a scientifically established analytical framework, the “sociological state idea” thus also represented a functional political and ideological construct, a means of conceptualizing the Monarchy that avoided the fatalistic conclusions of the old historicist model.
Masaryk's proposed reconceptualization of the state put him at odds with not only the liberal German centralizers, but also the aristocratic Old Czech Party and the more radical Young Czechs as well. Imprisoned by the logic of the historical school of law, these rival camps debated the traditional privileges of the Bohemian Provincial Diet, basing their claims to exclusive territorial autonomy on different interpretations of the same set of legal documents.Footnote 81 The only way out of this “zero-sum” conflict was through a rethinking of the terms of the debate, a reformulation of the theoretical basis on which Czech claims were based. By breaking with historicism and historically grounded arguments about Bohemian sovereignty, Masaryk entered an intellectual domain that was foreign to both parties, one that was capacious enough to allow for Czech and German coexistence within a restructured federalist Austrian state.Footnote 82
Masaryk, the “liberator” of Czechoslovakia and its President from 1918 to 1935, may seem an unlikely representative of this pro-imperial countermovement. Though the authoritarianism and anti-Slav paranoia of the wartime regime eventually led Masaryk to favor Czech independence, he remained a committed pluralist throughout his life. Examining his biography and political writings from the 1880s and 1890s, it becomes clear that his peculiar politics were motivated by a concern for the many bilingual and/or binational citizens of the Habsburg Monarchy, who, like Masaryk, were deeply rooted in the imperial domain. A sense of “in-betweenness” and existential unease can be clearly detected in Masaryk's later reflections on his youth.Footnote 83 He was ridiculed for his linguistic deficiencies as a student at the local German school, and his prose was characterized, his German-speaking peers remarked, by awkward “Slavicisms.”Footnote 84 His native language was Czech, but he moved in a world of German, the language in which he read, wrote, and tutored. Further, German “opened up a great deal of technical … and world literature” for him and provided access to the world of classical antiquity he so admired.Footnote 85
And while he identified as Czech, he spent his childhood near Brno, which was, as he described it, “almost a suburb of Vienna,” and came of age in the imperial capital. Prague, the future capital of the state he helped found, represented something utterly foreign, and indeed, he reported, frightened him: “I feared the smallness of Prague. I was a stranger to its people and to the life of the nation.”Footnote 86 His “concept of nationality and statehood” clashed, in his view, with those of “political parties … and the small circle of notables who placed nationalism above everything and viewed it as the vis motrix, the moving force, behind all public and private life.”Footnote 87 As a junior professor at the Czech-speaking University in Prague, he felt “alienated,” especially after the so-called “manuscript controversy,” in which he publicly challenged the authenticity of two supposedly ancient Slavic epics that had been circulating since the early nineteenth century.Footnote 88 This experience of linguistic and cultural liminality offers us an insight into what we could describe as Masaryk's lifelong intellectual project: overcoming “historicism.” His position on the corrupting and harmful influence of historicist thinking changed little between 1892, when he gave his address to parliament, and the 1930s. “I am not against history,” he remarked, “I am against historicism.”Footnote 89 He considered himself a “philosopher of history,” whose primary interest lay not in the history of the Czech state per se, but in the question, “What is a state, and how did today's state grow out of its past origins?”Footnote 90 Sociology, he believed, offered an answer to this question that affirmed national difference without validating the notion of historic rights.
GUMPLOWICZ'S SOCIOLOGICAL STATE IDEA: NORMALIZING THE HABSBURG “PATHOLOGY”
Ludwig Gumplowicz, to the extent that he is even remembered today, is discussed primarily, like Masaryk, with reference to nationalism and nation-building, not his attachment to the Habsburg state or interest in theorizing non-national communities. Born in Kraków (then an independent city-state jointly ruled by Austria, Russia, and Prussia; after 1846 an Austrian dependency) to a prominent Jewish family, Gumplowicz, an ardent Polish patriot in his youth, studied law in his hometown before relocating in 1875 to Graz, where he taught for over thirty years (eventually reaching the level of full professor in 1893).Footnote 91 He can be described as having lived “two lives,” the first as a Polish radical and the second as a German-Austrian academic.Footnote 92 Yet there are two additional labels that could be applied to this curious figure: cautious defender of the Dual Monarchy, and (secular) Jew.Footnote 93 Gumplowicz moved among at least four cultural worlds throughout his life, but he rarely found himself able, or was allowed by society, to embrace any one of these identities fully. As editor of the short-lived Polish-language journal Kraj (Country), he campaigned for the liberalization of Galician Polish society. His ideas, however, never gained much traction among Polish academics and intellectuals, and were routinely dismissed as fundamentally non-Polish in character. The mere suggestion that nations, as he contended, came into being through conquest and consisted of heterogeneous elements, was enough to signal to one reviewer that Gumplowicz “can only be a man of the Jewish race,” despite the fact that Gumplowicz ascribed a certain degree of historical inevitability to the emergence of the Polish nation.Footnote 94 After his Habilitationsschrift was rejected by the Jagiellonian University due to its anticlericalism, he resettled in Graz, where he converted to Protestantism and eventually earned his teaching license.Footnote 95 In the decades that followed, he only rarely left Graz, but the city, a hotbed of Pan-German nationalism, never felt like home to him.Footnote 96
Gumplowicz saw in sociology the basis for an idea of the state that was at once scientifically rational and politically cathartic. It offered the key to resolving political conflicts that challenged his personal identity and threatened to render him stateless. While not a formal contributor to the Ministry's advisory reports, he involved himself indirectly in the debate through the publication of a number of books and articles on the topic of Austrian law. Indeed, already in the introduction to his second major monograph, Philosophisches Staatsrecht (Philosophical constitutional law, 1877), Gumplowicz bemoaned the “adherence to … views, that in other fields have already been consigned to the lumber room of outdated prejudices.”Footnote 97 By clinging to these antiquated ideas about the state, the Austrian university, he wrote, was not only causing “damage” to the discipline of political science, but also harming the “university youth,” for whom this branch of knowledge formed a subject of prescribed, obligatory study.Footnote 98
His 1891 Das österreichische Staatsrecht (Austrian constitutional law) attempted to strike a balance between the “traditional and approved” method of historical legal analysis and emerging sociological theories of the state.Footnote 99 The legal and political sciences of the previous half-century, Gumplowicz explained, revolved around futile scholastic debates about how to properly categorize certain states and the exact distinction between analytical categories. “It is a vain effort,” he declared, “to sort the states of the world into species and types, and then to seek to fit a certain individual state into a rubric.”Footnote 100 “This false method was applied … in particular to so-called ‘composite’ [zusammengesetzt] states or ‘amalgams of states,’” Austria being a “favorite object of such academic speculation.”Footnote 101 “When people call Austria-Hungary an Empire [Reich],” this label should not, he cautioned, be taken to mean that the Monarchy “forms anything other than a state.”Footnote 102 “Conceptually, Austria, like Russia, like Turkey,”—the three polities typically referred to at the time, and still today, as multiethnic empires—“can only be states.”Footnote 103 The distinction commonly made between nations and empires proved to be illusory upon closer inspection. “If one takes into account,” he remarked, “the overseas possessions of European states, it is clear that there are no nation-states in Europe; even the apparently purest nation-state in Europe, France, is on account of its Algerian possessions essentially a multinational state [Nationalitätenstaat].”Footnote 104 Even within the “metropole,” the existence of national minorities, such as the Danes in Germany and Welsh in Great Britain, and the formation of social classes, which coded formerly national conflicts, contradicted the pretensions of self-declared nation-states.Footnote 105 All states, he flatly declared, were “composite states,” and as such no “conceptual difference” existed between “empire” (Reich) and “state” (State).Footnote 106
This imaginary distinction, he further argued, resulted not from some benign and inconsequential error on the part of scholars; it was the consequence of the ideological weaponization of “empire.” “State-theorists … model the ‘nature of the state’ in a such a way,” he contended, “that it can be theoretically useful to their aims.”Footnote 107 In the nineteenth century, the ideology of the state-theorists was the organicist theory of the state, according to which nation-building represents one stage in the “ascending evolution” of peoples.Footnote 108 “Constitutional lawyers and national historians” acknowledged the role of conquest and conflict in social development, yet refused to admit that such processes played any role in shaping their own nations, choosing to present the fatherland as a metaphysically ever-present entity that merely expanded with time. “In Germany,” for example, “the correctness of these [sociological] theses [was] recognized for ancient Greece or India, but not for Germany.”Footnote 109 Self-delusion and myth making was not an exclusively German problem, though. In Poland, too, the “national historians want[ed] nothing to do at all with such an origin of peoples and states, let alone allow it for Poland.”Footnote 110 Fundamentally, the error these authors committed, whether consciously or not, was that they saw nationality “not as something that has come into being, but rather something that has always, from the very beginning of time,… been given.”Footnote 111 Despite the misleading title of one of his major works, he categorically rejected the concept of biological race or ethnicity, and instead treated social groups as unstable, historically evolving products of conquest, subjugation, and assimilation.Footnote 112
In a review published the same year as Österreichisches Staatsrecht, he dismissed theories of the state being propounded by German scholars as unscientific attempts to justify “the present-day situation of the German Reich as a historical necessity.”Footnote 113 Wherever “tribe,” “people,” “nation,” and “nationality” “failed to correspond to each other,” as, for example, in Austria, there the existing political formation was declared by them “to be outright abnormal and pathological [krankhaft],” despite the fact that a “realistic and statistical examination of states,” such as the one being proposed by Gumplowicz and his sociologically minded colleagues, demonstrated “that this abnormality and pathology afflicted nearly every state on the earth.”Footnote 114 This new, more “realistic” approach to political science sought to provide a more universally applicable understanding of the state as a social institution, and Austria, he believed, was uniquely suited to contribute to the process by which these truths would be revealed. Gumplowicz argued that in the self-styled nation-states of France and Germany, a myth of national and ethnic homogeneity obscured the exploitative nature of the state; the Dual Monarchy laid bare the fundamentally hierarchical and conflictive relationship between groups within the state and thus represented a kind a sociological “Eldorado,” “an unparalleled field of experiences” where “not only economic classes fight each other,” but also “peoples, nationalities, and confessions.”Footnote 115 “It is no mere coincidence,” he remarked, that “it is precisely Austria that has produced the first scientific system of politics.”Footnote 116
In 1892, Gumplowicz summarized his critique of legal vocabulary in a convocation address to the University of Graz entitled “The Sociological Idea of the State” (Die sociologische Staatsidee).Footnote 117 Until the present era, he argued, concepts of state had proceeded not from empirical analysis, but from a set of idealistic presuppositions, which constituted political ideologies and corresponded to group interests within the state. The “idea of the state” was idealized and, in turn, instrumentalized, thereby precluding the possibility of a disinterested, scientific engagement with the question of politics. In contrast to the classical, medieval, and modern bourgeois concepts of state, the sociological state idea served not to legitimate a certain political regime, but to “promote knowledge.”Footnote 118 Gumplowicz conceived of this Staatsidee as a purely theoretical framework, not as a public proposal for a new Austrian identity. At the same time, though, he believed that the sociological state idea—the world's most modern, scientific, and realistic model of the state—would take root organically in Austria before it did elsewhere and would have therapeutic effects there. With its realistic view of the state, its purpose, and its abilities it promised to minimize and contain the negative effects of group conflict: “…while idealistic state ideas (Staatsideen), insofar as they push the nature and the goals of the state to unrealizable heights, only increase bitterness toward the actual state, which fails to satisfy the aspirations it arouses, the sociological idea of the state has a soothing and calming effect, insofar as it accounts for the inability of the state to ever eliminate social conflict from this world.”Footnote 119
And though the Austrian Monarchy is only explicitly referenced once in the book, articles and editorials from this same period in his career suggest that his meditations on the history of concepts of state had a more current and locally specific meaning. For nearly two decades, Gumplowicz had railed against the concepts of state put forth by those he called the “national historians”: Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Joseph von Held, and Robert von Mohl, as well as a number of younger Polish jurists.Footnote 120 Yet, in making these personal indictments, he intended to do much more than simply discredit a handful of politically compromised academics: the main target of his critique was not any individual, but the theoretical logic that sustained the nation-state principle—the belief that states organized according to these national divisions somehow enjoyed a greater legitimacy than non-national political forms, such as composite empires.
From a sociological perspective, the “normal case,” he suggested, was empire, not the nation-state. Every state, whether its political leaders and intellectuals knew it or not, had essentially the same origins—conquest and subjugation of one group by another—and the same purpose—the continued exploitation of this group. The artificial distinction made between nations and empires was a product of recent European history, an ideology imposed upon the rest of the world by Europe's imperial powers. A century before postcolonial scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty formulated their critiques of the “imagined Europe” of the social sciences, Gumplowicz had already identified, it seems, the sources of this distortion and recognized the urgent necessity of attempts to “provincialize” the European idea of the state.Footnote 121 In what was perhaps the first academic article to employ a variant of the term “Eurocentrism” (Europocentrismus), Gumplowicz decried the narrative according to which European colonialism was responsible for integrating the rest of the world into the “main process” of history and bringing about the formation of a single global “humanity.”Footnote 122 This self-congratulatory and self-delusional idea could only be sustained, Gumplowicz remarked, by willfully ignoring the real causes of European expansion and colonialism, which were everywhere one and the same: exploitation.
If it were not for “our political scientists,” he argued, Europe would have long ago recognized the ugly fact that the “European colonist today” differs from the “Asiatic nomad” of the “barbarian invasions” “only in his desire to conceal his true intentions.”Footnote 123 It was the “Eurocentrism” of political science that allowed the myths of European colonialism to thrive, and only through relativizing the hegemonic European idea of the state could the threat posed by imperialistic fantasies be neutralized.Footnote 124 Disarming German, Polish, and Hungarian nationalists—who shared with Bluntschli, Mohl, Held, and other constitutional lawyers a common vision of an expanding, homogenizing national-imperial state—and protecting the Monarchy's marginal and interstitial populations thus depended on the propagation of the sociological “truth,” the truth revealed by the Austrian state and its historical sociology.Footnote 125
CONTINENTAL EMPIRES AND LANGUAGES OF SELF-RATIONALIZATION
Living in a state declared antiquated and moribund by European academics, sociologists such as Gumplowicz and Masaryk were keenly aware of the conceptual structures and narratives that excluded, marginalized, and pathologized multinational, composite empires such as Austria and Russia. They recognized that the future political order being proclaimed and scientifically “verified” by nationalist agitators did not simply necessitate the end of the (relatively) liberal Habsburg state to which they had grown attached. More fundamentally, they saw that this political order was predicated upon a utopic vision of identitarian homogeneity to which they, given their backgrounds and interests, could not and would not subscribe. In the era before World War I, heterogeneity represented the norm, not the exception, in East Central Europe, and in this respect the intellectual negotiations of the figures discussed here must be seen to reflect dilemmas faced in multiethnic society more broadly. Scholars fearing the nation-state or wishing to counter the chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Slavic claims of Central European political science—Jews, Bukovinian Germans, Czechs, Slovenians, and others—found themselves entering unusual alliances with each other and with the imperial state.Footnote 126
While it is true that a large portion of the population looked upon the idea of the nation with indifference, it should be noted that others responded more actively to the growing hegemony of the national ideal, pursuing a variety of political and philosophical projects that aimed to expose the intellectual poverty of European nationalism and shore up “empire,” the supposed antithesis of the modern (national) state. This movement emerged not from homogenizing urban centers of the Monarchy—Vienna, Prague, Budapest—but from its peripheries, crystallizing in networks and institutions that have long been overlooked by scholars of late imperial Austria and turn-of-the-century Europe generally.Footnote 127 Of course, the sociological idea of the state was not the only strategy employed by the Monarchy's loyalists. Vocal critics of new sociological approaches, such as Edmund Bernatzik, an influential German-Austrian jurist, and Friedrich Tezner, a Bohemian of Jewish origin, sought to defend the state through different lines of argument. Bernatzik rejected the “objective” method of national attribution and took aim at the concept of national legal personhood.Footnote 128 Tezner proceeded from a historicist approach and insisted that Austria constituted a political entity sui generis, and he dismissed all attempts to categorize it according to the prevailing distinction between federal states and confederations.Footnote 129
Nonetheless, the sociological view of the state seems to have offered a particularly effective framework for countering the claims of nationalist constitutional lawyers, and it attracted a growing number of adherents as the Monarchy entered the twentieth century. In response to increasingly frequent and forceful calls for reform, the Ministry of Education once again solicited the advice of the Empire's law faculties in 1913.Footnote 130 This time around, the Ministry's questionnaire asked faculty committees for their positions on, among other things, proposed courses in “Social Theory” (Gesellschaftslehre) and the “Theory of the State” (Staatslehre).Footnote 131 Given the favorable advisory opinions submitted by the committees, it is reasonable to conclude that the Ministry might have implemented many of the reforms recommended by Masaryk and Gumplowicz had the war not broken out in 1914.
The articulation of this new sociological state idea thus represents a key chapter in both Austrian and European history. Like the Habsburg Monarchy, the Russian and Ottoman Empires struggled around the turn of the twentieth century, with varying degrees of success, to translate their official languages of self-justification into more modern, scientific idioms. The Ottomans, faced with the threat of minority separatism, began in the Tanzimat reform era to elaborate a pluralistic and ecumenical notion of Ottomanism; loyalty to the Sultan and Caliph was thus combined with a new state ideology founded on a semi-secular supranationalism.Footnote 132 Russia found itself in a similar position, its state idea tied to an aristocratic notion of “official nationality” and religious orthodoxy. Here, the failure of Russification campaigns, which ran up against increasingly powerful nationalist movements, sparked on the left an effort to theorize the possibility of a reformed, democratic multiethnic Russian Empire.Footnote 133 The fact that Austria's sociologists managed to eventually implement some of their proposed reforms in the official state curriculum suggests that the Habsburg Empire in fact had made great strides in dealing with the more general issue confronting Europe's composite empires. It developed a field of knowledge—sociology—that undermined rather than reinforced the ingrained assumptions of European political philosophy, and in this sense it can be argued that the process of “provincializing” Europe began within Europe itself, in a region of the continent marked as abnormal and premodern.Footnote 134
It is perhaps precisely because these early sociologists rejected the modernist lens of European political philosophy that in the twentieth century they fell into obscurity. As Karl Acham notes, Gumplowicz, “unlike Simmel, Weber, and Durkheim,” refused to posit a “theory of modernity,” dismissing speculation on the nature of modern society as unproductive and potentially dangerous.Footnote 135 For this reason, he never became part of the canon of thinkers that has shaped sociological research from the twentieth century to the present. Yet today's canon bears little resemblance to the body of texts that, around 1914, were regarded as foundational to the discipline, and reflects only a small aspect of the much wider sociological discourse.Footnote 136 Among the founding members and presidents of the International Institute of Sociology, established in 1893, we count as many Italians, Spaniards, Austrians, and Russians as Frenchmen and Germans, and Durkheim and Weber never even became, it seems, formal affiliates.Footnote 137 A statist sociology vied in the decades before the First World War with the sociology of multiethnic spaces, and it was unclear which definition of the field would prevail. If, as Andrew Zimmerman argues, a Tuskegee-Berlin-Togo sociological school fused internal colonialism with overseas imperialism, another critical contingent of sociologists took aim at this intellectual justification for nationalist imperialism in an effort to defend the possibility of multiethnic statehood.Footnote 138
The existence of this Habsburg sociological school complicates the picture of East Central European pathological nationalism painted by Hans Kohn, a native of Prague born a year before the debate analyzed here. Since the beginning of the postmodern turn in nationalism studies, a number of scholars have criticized Kohn's distinction between Western civic nationalism and Eastern ethic nationalism as being both historically inaccurate and ideologically motivated.Footnote 139 It was perhaps this framing of Eastern Europe that Gumplowicz had in mind when he criticized mainstream political science's tendency to juxtapose supposedly normal “national” states, such as France, with abnormal “multinational” states, such as Habsburg Austria. His call to compare “like with like,” Austria with the French and British Empires, rather than with the relatively new and artificially bounded French and British nation-states, would not sound foreign to a contemporary scholar familiar with the literature of the “imperial turn.” Not only did Habsburg sociologists reject the ethnonationalist idea of the state, they also problematized, like social scientists a century later, the characterization of Europe's East as a distinctly ethnocentric region. To be sure, not every insight of the imperial turn and revisionist nationalism studies was anticipated by Habsburg sociology, yet it is difficult to deny that it accepted many of the same premises of twenty-first-century scholarship. Sociologists such as Masaryk and Gumplowicz urged readers to think transnationally and to historicize and relativize the arbitrary boundaries of newly formed or forming nation-states. They also developed concepts of eurocentrism, identifying these as central to the continued maintenance of the distinction between metropole and colony that undergirded the nation-state principle. Finally, they insisted on the indistinct boundary between imperialism and nationalism and the limited usefulness of these terms.
It is striking that, before 1918, very few Austrian scholars working in the field of Austrian constitutional law were condemning the empire to inevitable dissolution. There was general agreement that a new idea of the state was taking shape, or at the very least, could yet be discovered if only the Austrian state and Austrian academia would embrace the sociological view of the state. What prevented the development of a viable idea of the state was not, they claimed, the nature of Austria, but a certain model of legal education, one imported from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and premised on the natural congruity of the law, the nation, and the state. As Gumplowicz remarked in 1896, “Far worse than the lack of a positive state idea … were the doubts, fed for many decades by German scholars of constitutional law, about the existential justification of the Austrian Monarchy as a polynational state.”Footnote 140 “How,” he asked, “could one get excited about a state idea that allegedly only led an artificial pseudo-life and was supposed to disintegrate, at any moment, into its ‘natural’ constitutive parts?”Footnote 141 The war—which ended with the victory of Western Europe's self-described “nation-states” and the collapse of the continent's dynastic “empires”—seemed to validate the modernist idea of the state that many, including Gumplowicz and Masaryk, had come to reject during the preceding thirty years. Rather than interpret the fall of Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire as the result of a confluence of contingent events, academics mistakenly saw in this outcome the revelation of a deep, universal truth about multiethnic states, reinforcing the distinction between nation-states and empires for decades to come.
