Liberal parties fared poorly in the politics of late Habsburg Austria, yet Deborah Coen argues that nineteenth-century Austro-German liberalism should be imagined in a context larger than lost elections. We must recognize liberalism's importance in the realms of sensibility, lifestyle, science, pedagogy, and leisure. In refreshing ways, Coen's book revises the half-truths of Carl Schorske's picture of Austrian liberalism as a father's credo overwhelmed after 1880 by rebellious oedipal sons, anti-Semitism, and aesthetic modernisms. Although acknowledging elitist and utopian aspects of the liberal ethos, Coen depicts liberal strategies for navigating pre-1914 change with pronounced sympathy and claims that liberalism was more supple and less hostile to modernism and generational challenge than Schorske thought. More broadly, she expands our understanding of the scientific and philosophical imaginations in Austria, the history of ethics, and relationships between the public and private spheres.

Coen fashions a group biography of the Austrian Bildungsbürgertum over three generations between the 1820s and 1940s, centering on the Exner family as a scientific dynasty. This is not a stereotypical “rise and decline” tale, however, for Coen stresses the enduring aspects of the Exners' positive achievement. The philosopher Franz Exner (1802–1853), founder of the family's greatness, helped adapt the humanistic ideal of Bildung to the circumstances of the Austro-German Vormärz, linking it in his educational theory to the antideterminist, anti-Hegelian doctrines of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Exner's ideas influenced the Austrian educational reforms of the 1850s, intended to modernize pedagogy and make instruction relevant to civic responsibility. A leitmotiv of Coen's story is the premise that liberals of the Exner stamp were positioned between Catholic dogmatism—stifling to freedom—and rising ethnic and socialist populisms—which they perceived as anarchistic and relativist.

In response, using assumptions partly drawn from the discipline of statistics, the Exners fashioned an idealized realist—though not antimodernist—aesthetic sense, and crafted an antideterministic, probabilist epistemology designed to sustain dialogues of communicative reason trending toward a consensual “perspectival objectivity” rather than hubristic certainty—a Danubian variation on Voltaire's idea that doubt is unpleasant but certainty is absurd. The peculiarly Austrian inflection of this probabilistic epistemology and ethical style was refined by Franz Exner's children—the jurist Adolf Exner, the physicists Karl and Seraphin, the physiologist Sigmund, and their sister Marie Exner von Frisch. Via teaching and sociability, this second generation nurtured probabilism within the cultivated Bürgertum, making it a template for academic policy, science, and legal thought.

The axis of Coen's family history is not so much Vienna as Brunnwinkl, the Exner's summer retreat in the Salzkammergut. Brunnwinkl was not an escapist refuge from real-world change of the sort famously depicted in Schorske's reading of Stifter's Der Nachsommer. It was a site where privacy and sociability interlaced with public concerns in discussions with such neighbors and visitors as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Theodor Billroth, and Gottfried Keller. The children learned to esteem the contingent dynamics of nature, and scientific projects were conceptualized and carried out. The ethos of probabilism and respect for chance and uncertainty were honed, Coen asserts, by interactions with the Alpine weather and ecology and by the practical skills of hunters and farmers in negotiating nature's contingences.

In chapters informed by familiarity with current thought on objectivity and the history of science, Coen shows how liberal and probabilistic assumptions bore prolific fruit in the research fields of the second and third generation Exners and their students like Erwin Schrödinger and Fritz Kohlrausch: brain science, color perception theory, theoretical physics, meteorology, and insect behavior, to cite a few examples. Two Exners—Adolf and Seraphin—became rectors of the University of Vienna before 1914, where they defended academic freedom, humanistic values, and the ideal of “political Bildung.” In what might be read as an ironic “fall” of the family heritage, some children nurtured at Brunnwinkl became Nazi supporters in the 1930s. Yet Coen sustains the positive thrust of her narrative, explaining this in terms of conditions spawned by the Great War and the Depression, not generational rebellion or contradictions within the liberal ethos (345–46).

Coen has a storyteller's instincts, and sometimes her tale's symmetry may seem a bit too neat. She might be more thorough in documenting the precise importance of hunter and farmer models for the Exners' probabilist orientation, as well as the correlation between the Sommerfrische tradition, the Exners' life strategies, and those of the refined Bürgertum as a whole. Yet she has written a most impressive first book that brings us dramatically closer to solving the Rubik's Cube of liberalism's history in Austria.