David S. Luft offers a rare and significant book on the Austrian mind. Austrian Germans have in the modern age offered their own singular understanding of existence, both individual and communal. Luft tracks important Austrian thought from 1740 until the crippling blow to the creative Austrian mind with the Anschluss. He idenitifes a continuing character that is Austrian-German, an identity in thought and behavior heretofore not so well-argued. What he promises beyond insights into Austrian thought as well as its public policies is even more exciting as one begins to read. “The conventional separation of political history from the study of language, literature, and philosophy (a separation that is often even sharper in Europe than in the United States) has prevented certain issues from finding clear formulation; and the perspective of history, philosophy, literature, and the human sciences are rarely brought together in a unified way. These pages present an historical narrative that includes an appreciation for what is Austrian in German intellectual life and a recognition of the nature of Austria's place within Central European German culture” (1).
What is promised has been understood as metahistory by José Ortega y Gassett, Hayden White, and other twentieth-century historians. That is, a tracking over generations of essential ideas that can be found in a nation's politics, economics, literature, philosophy, as well as the sciences. We do not get this from Luft, however, and the chief problem is not his insight into many movements of Austrian-German thought from the Enlightenment into the twentieth century, but his limitation of these forms of thought to only the Habsburg governance of Cisleithania, and not its other domains; and not extending what he recognizes in the Enlightenment period of Josephinism to later generations as he takes up the many writers, philosophers, scientists, and even economists that are Austrian.
As a plan, the introduction gives us a vision not completed, but it is a plan that Austrian historians can take further. Beginning with Austria's ancient history, Luft helps us to understand distinct geographical and ethnic situations that the Austrian-Germans would have to comprehend and accommodate over the centuries. Luft presents an early history in his introduction that takes Austrian-German concerns back to the Roman Empire and Marcus Aurelius. Austria's proximity to other ethnicities from the south and east is a large part of why and how its legacy of thought differs from the Germanies to the north and west of its lands. The legacy for the Habsburgs from the late Middle Ages through the first decade of the twentieth century was an openness to the dozen differing ethnicities that came to be under Austrian dominance until World War I.
This willingness to cooperate with the other ethnicities bred a form of thought that Martin Buber will call the “I-Thou,” a form especially counseled by Joseph von Sonnenfels as the chief minister to Maria Theresa in the mid-Enlightenment. Yet, and this is his chief weakness throughout the text, Luft limits certain Austrian trains of thought to a distinctive period, rather than it being shown as acontinuing form of thought throughout its history. He limits his insights into the spread of Josephinism, his main appellation for cooperative governance, only to Cisleithania. His last paragraph in the introduction is characteristic of this problem—accurate facts with some omissions, but a hesitancy to see the metacognitive overview of successive time periods and geographical breadth in Austrian rule in general. Luft writes: “It is sometimes confusing for Americans and West Europeans to have political and religious leadership described with the same term, let alone to have the term refer to the Austrian Enlightenment as a whole. What is most often passed over about Josephinism is that its administrative practices applied primarily to Cisleithanian Austria rather than the empire as a whole, whether to Hungary or Italy or the Austrian Netherlands” (26-27). Factually, Hungary, and other areas to the East, such as Bukovina, as well as to the southwest, in Italy, did benefit from the administrative openness as a manner of dealing with the emergent ethnic demands of the nineteenth century.
Luft does not draw these lines of argument about the Austrian style of interpersonal relations and public policy geared for cooperation from his factual insights. Offering three pages on Sonnenfels, he strangely suggests that Sonnenfels’ major contribution furthered the emergent German nationalism, because of his attention to the modern German thought and language of his time. It was Sonnenfels who established the “I-Thou” of administrative interaction with those affected by Imperial policy. This is clear in his administrative guidelines Über den Geschäftsstyl: die erste Grundlage für angehende österreichische Canzleybeame (1784/1820) as well as in Louise Sommer's excellent discussion of Sonnenfels’ influence on Austrian administrative norms (Österreichische Kameralisten in Dogmengeschichtliche Darstellung [1920]).
Luft's problem overall is the absence of fully developed, distinctive theses, which he has glimpsed, about the uniqueness of Austrian thought, even as he provides geographical and historical facts that would help him build a clear case for the Austrian mind over the centuries.
