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Review of Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

From 1919 to 1934, socialist Vienna was guided by the "critical rationalism" and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners, whose influence endured long after they lost power.

Yet he does show how integrated thinking, total planning, and scientific rigor could be turned to evil ends: Odilo Globocnik, who Crockett says may have been “the officer who first suggested the idea of industrial-scale mass-murder,” gathered a “genocide think-tank” of experts, “very recognizably a Viennese project, stirring a variety of different disciplines together to produce a terrifying new praxis.” The innovative researcher Hans Asperger worked experiments with children at the deadly Am Spiegelgrund clinic. He writes knowledgeably on film but relatively briefly on music, art, and literature: sketches of Walter and Eva Neurath founding the publishing house Thames and Hudson (named after the rivers of the cities of refuge) in 1949 and of Ernst Gombrich “approaching images as mental constructs” left me impatient to know more. Four books, he claims, “have defined the main contours of Western political discourse over the past seven or so decades”: Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy(1942), with its ringing endorsement of the entrepreneur; Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Polanyi’s The Great Transformation(both 1944); and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies(1945).

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