Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty is an ambitious and most certainly welcome, if overly ambitious, addition to the literature on Vienna 1900. Deborah Coen's study focuses upon a family of insiders in Vienna, the Exners. They gave the university a handful of highly distinguished professors working in areas such as philosophy, physics, physiology, ethology, meteorology, and education. Two rose to become rectors, while a third (Karl von Frisch) would receive a (mysteriously unmentioned) Nobel Prize. Her ambition is to write a collective biography of three generations of Exners emphasizing how that “Exnerei” incorporated a liberal family ethos that stamped the development of science in Austria with an anti-dogmatic (and therefore un-German) probabilistic mentality, which in turn helps to explain Vienna's preeminence in science before the Anschluß. It is a monumental project moving from detailed discussions of liberal educational politics to theories of color perception, stochastic probability, the physics of waves, and animal behavior, all of which is carried out with bravura. The Exner story is well documented on the basis of both family papers and familiarity with their diverse writings. It is narrated with verve and emphasis upon how their love of nature was cultivated en famille in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller at their family refugium, Brunnwinckl, on Wolfgangsee near Salzburg.

Students of Vienna 1900 must be grateful to Coen for her efforts to introduce the history of science into mainstream developments within Austrian cultural history. No small part of that achievement bears upon the admirable lucidity with which she presents complex concepts of, say, color perception or the physics of air pressure. Indeed, the significance of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty's contribution to Austrian cultural history rests upon her rightful insistence that both the families of the Viennese elite and the history of science are integral elements in the development of Viennese culture. She is certainly right to focus upon a family of insiders; for insiders are a group that has been curiously neglected by Austrian cultural historians (Karl-Heinz Roßbacher being the exception with his family studies on the relation between liberalism and literature). In a way her theme is classical Bildung as a pillar of Austrian intellectual life from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and she handles it beautifully, for example, in establishing the centrality of aesthetics to Austrian scientific debates ca. 1900.

Indulging in a spot of Schorske-bashing, Coen reprimands the father of Austrian cultural history for having prematurely announced the demise of the scientific-rational tradition in Austrian thought with the advent of that peculiar form of irrationalism that was Viennese modernism. Her defense of Viennese scientific rationalism is only partly on target, however. Coen seems to have bitten off more than she can chew. In her rejection of Schorske's thesis about the failure of liberalism she rightly tries to defend the position of the professors at the University of Vienna with respect to Klimt's “Philosophy,” i.e., that it was the aesthetic rather than the moral character of the picture that was objectionable. She does not, however, manage to state the case as clearly as Georg Gimpl in his essays on Freidrich Jodl in Vernetzungen. More importantly, she misinterprets Klimt's picture: it is not about knowledge and skepticism but the instinctual and therefore irrational foundations of scientific reasoning (“tiefer als der Tag gedacht” in Nietzsche's words). Indeed, its inspiration is the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, who is absolutely central to Schorske's analysis but receives no mention here. Furthermore, her discussion of liberalism focuses exclusively upon personal values and does not touch upon liberal politics at all. The very names of Ernst von Plener or Cajetan Felder, the most prominent Viennese liberal politicians in the nineteenth century, do not occur in the book. While she focuses upon the Exners' role in the life of the University of Vienna, politics as such does not figure in her narrative as it does in connection with other liberal academics such as Redlich, Friedjung, Billroth, or Menger, which tends to confirm rather than refute Schorske. At the end of the story she describes how Karl von Frisch and Robert Exner could continue their research within the Nazi system, extending the tradition of state service on the part of a family that had been privileged from Imperial times. Coen does not make nearly enough of the idea that the Exners' success in Austrian scholarly life was dependent upon academic and administrative appointments from the old Imperial government. In a sense their liberalism was liberalism by His Majesty's grace. Moreover, there is much to be said for the thesis that their liberalism was, in the words of John Boyer, a paternalistic “conservative liberalism”—something that is in need of much more analysis generally by historians of the period. How liberal is a liberal who tells other people to “know thyself” as Emilie Exner (Sigmund's wife) did criticizing the academic aspirations of “normal” young women? How normal is such a concept of normalcy?

Nevertheless, the perspective of the upper-middle-class family that informs Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty is certainly welcome. Vienna did indeed have a “second society” as well as an aristocracy, which the “second society” tended to imitate in its efforts at self-legitimation as Schorske insists. Being composed of some 200 families, the elite of Besitz und Bildung was smaller and perhaps even more closely knit than the aristocracy. Among the names of its most prominent members we find the likes of Rothschild, Gomperz, Brücke, Mises, and, of course, the inevitable Wittgenstein. These families were complex “cousinhoods,” as they are sometimes called in the English context (see Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin for an example of such a family, which also bears upon science), which are much in need of historical investigation if we are to understand the social fabric of the upper crust in Old Vienna. In their self presentation, however, these families were prone to a certain self-glorification that was not without a distinctive pathos all its own. The Exners as a family need to be recontextualized in a way that Coen really only begins to do; moreover, the documentary sources of that family history always require careful scrutiny of a sort that enters only briefly in the last phase of Coen's story.

There are a number of other points in Coen's presentation that are grating to the knowledgeable reader. In histories of science the opponents in intellectual debate seldom confront each other as heroes and villains (as they frequently do in the history of philosophy); however, Coen is very much prone to presenting the Exners with white hats and their scientific adversaries with black ones. Thus, to the uninformed reader, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Vilhelm Bjerknes appear in the narrative as such caricatured German dogmatists that it comes as a shock that the first was probably the most distinguished German-speaking scientist of all in the second half of nineteenth century (if such generalizations are at all permissible); the second, the father of physical chemistry and 1909 Nobel Prize winner (also unmentioned); and the third, the author of one of the most poetic passages in twentieth-century science, in which he described what we now call a meteorological front as “the weather's face” (Lt. frons, forehead). Ludwig Boltzmann, who did as much as anybody to develop probability theory and is therefore a positive figure in her story, was himself a believing Catholic who saw no possibility of a clash between faith and reason, which he rightly considered in a Pascalian vein as belonging to two different orders of reality. Further, her categorization of figures such as H. S. Chamberlain as “racist” and Karl Lueger as the “leader of Vienna's Catholic conservatives” is simply cavalier: J. P. Stern, for example, explicitly denied the former allegation, whereas John Boyer has contested the latter vehemently and persuasively. The conservative Catholics in Old Vienna were the higher clergy, who looked upon Lueger & Co. in a way roughly similar to the way the Latin American hierarchy views the Theology of Liberation. There is less familiarity with the conceptual basis of Austrian cultural history here than meets the eye. So it is not merely churlishness that motivates a sympathetic critic to underscore such details. There is much to be learned from Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty because it introduces fresh and important themes into the discussion but those themes must be integrated critically into the broader conceptual framework initiated by Schorske, Boyer, and others. This can and should be done. When it is, we should also expect a weighty contribution to Austrian cultural history from Coen.