Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World – with Richard Cockett

Danny Buerkli: My guest today is Richard Cockett. Richard is a historian, a senior editor at The Economist, and the author of numerous excellent books. His most recent one is called Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. Richard, welcome.

Richard Cockett: Thank you very much, Danny. Good to be here.

Danny: Richard, what did you learn from your correspondence with Karl Popper?

Richard: My correspondence with Karl Popper was very brief and came towards the end of a book I was writing called Thinking the Unthinkable, which was all about Austrian economics and how it influenced the Thatcher governments and the Reagan governments in the United States. I think I was merely asking for permission to quote some letters between him and Hayek, his colleague, and it was sort of a couple of letters. But it was just, yes, I think just before his death, actually.

Danny: Oh, wow. So just in the nick of time. Nothing too interesting or revealing?

Richard: Nothing too interesting or revealing.

Danny: In that book, in Thinking the Unthinkable, you make the point that sometimes outsiders are more astute observers than the insiders. What were you able to see about the Viennese story that others didn’t?

Richard: I have been told that myself by many Viennese, that only an outsider, only a non-Viennese could have written the book I wrote about Vienna. I think the reason for that—I mean, I think that’s true of all places or writers—the best book probably that remains about America is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The best chronicler of modern Italy is the British historian Denis Mack Smith, and the list goes on. And my predecessor writing about Vienna was Carl Schorske. So I’m merely one of a long list, I think.

But I think particularly, the Austrians—or the Viennese, sorry, I should say—have a difficult relationship with modern history, of course, because of the Nazis. You know, Hitler was an Austrian. Nazism as an ideology started in Vienna. Theirs was an outsized contribution to the Holocaust.

So there’s a lot of embarrassment and shame mixed with this sort of tawdry excuse, the Anschluss alibi, that Austria in 1938 were the first victims of Nazism because Hitler invaded Austria. And that’s always been an out for the sort of general official narrative of Austria, that they were victims rather than perpetrators. So in no other country, I think, is the narrative so mixed—so confused, I should say. So I think I could come along with a much clearer perspective: what was good, what was bad, and how the two sides interacted.

So I think that’s what I could bring to the subject. And the other thing, of course, I don’t think anyone in Vienna realized the enormous impact all those exiles had on world history. That’s what I was most interested in, actually—what happened after 1938. That was my primary interest. So I was working backwards.

If you’re a Viennese historian, of course, an Austrian politics writer or whatever, of course you start from Vienna. I started from New York and London and worked backwards. So I think that gave me a very unique perspective on the whole subject, which, of course, the Viennese were extremely grateful for because, again, their relation—many of those exiles, they were Viennese, clearly. But because of the Nazi period, etcetera, many of them didn’t want to have anything to do with Vienna ever again. Many of them never came back to the city.

So there, again, there was a complete divorce between the city and its extraordinarily high-achieving diaspora. So in some ways, the book brings the two together again and brings back the legacy of those people who left Vienna to Vienna itself. So I think I’m repeating a lot of what I’ve been told by Viennese people themselves when I give the numerous book talks I’ve given about the book in Vienna.

Danny: They must have been very excited that someone wrote such a good book, and it is a very good book, I should say. Everyone should read it.

Richard: I think they were excited, and it came at a good moment too, when I think the balance between considering the good and the bad is now roughly in equilibrium. So they themselves have a much clearer notion of what went wrong and what went right, and they will celebrate the things they should be celebrating and lamenting the things they should be lamenting. So I think it came at the right time too.

Danny: You make the point that Vienna of the early twentieth century and up until the Anschluss was this really phenomenal hotbed of intellectual activity, and you explain the different reasons for what made it so. I’d love to go into some of these, starting with how the conception of the Viennese or the Austrian idea of Bildung—education—was quite different from the German one, interestingly.

Richard: Yeah. They were related. I wouldn’t say it was wholly different, but Bildung was a German concept, a concept of the Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, the North German Enlightenment, Protestant Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, associated with Goethe and Schiller and those figures, and musicians too—Beethoven. And it was basically the idea of self-advancement, self-improvement through education, autodidactism, going to university, etcetera. It was a way, if you like, of getting on in the world if you were not part of the aristocracy, of the settled aristocracy.

So it was all wrapped in political liberalism, part of political liberalism—that society could be more fluid, meritocracy, if you like. And the Viennese version of Bildung was a bit more democratic and a bit more meritocratic still than the German. And of course in Vienna, it was inextricably linked with Jewish culture and Jewish self-improvement. So Vienna was a magnet for clever Jewish families from throughout the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were very important, wonderful cities—little Viennas, if you like—dotted throughout the Empire in provinces like long-forgotten provinces like Galicia, which is now modern Western Ukraine.

So there, Kyiv and particularly Lviv, as we call it now, they were hotbeds. Lviv was particularly famous for its mathematicians and lawyers. But generally, if you wanted to get on in the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, you came to Vienna, you went to a gymnasium, and then you went to the famous University of Vienna, which at that point was the most prestigious on the continent and one of the oldest. So that was all part of Bildung, and the Viennese, like their German equivalents, worshipped the gods of Bildung, as they say—Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven. It was a sort of shared culture.

It was very, very strong in Vienna. Austria was a relatively open society—I stress relatively—compared to Germany where the Prussian influence, a very rigid hierarchical system, was stronger. But under the Habsburgs, the Habsburgs were more liberal in the sense that they allowed—they were much more tolerant of different ideas, different outlooks, different dispositions, which meant it was much easier for modernism, cultural artistic modernism, to get a foothold in Vienna than it was, say, in Germany or Berlin. This was before the First World War. After the First World War, of course, you then have the Weimar Republic and Weimar culture.

But before the First World War, Vienna was the leading modernist city. Paris would quibble with that, but I would put the case for Vienna on the continent, and that again drew more people in. So it became a sort of virtuous circle.

Danny: How come so much of the important intellectual formation seemed to happen at home rather than in the gymnasiums and universities?

Richard: Yeah. I mean, a lot—I mean, the gymnasiums have these amazing reputations as kind of intellectual hothouses. In fact, going through the memoirs of all the people who had to go there, they just talk of the tedium, learning by rote systems in the gymnasiums. I mean, it was a sort of very rigorous education, but entirely uncreative and deadening.

But as you’ve mentioned, a lot of the most important education went on at home, and this speaks to the autodidactism of the Viennese middle classes and the Jewish—particularly Jewish—thirst for education, for self-improvement, for knowledge. And in my book, I give various snapshots of these Viennese kids in their apartments. And the apartments themselves on the Ringstrasse, the main circular boulevard running around the First District, many of these apartments were like mini universities in themselves in which these kids grew up. So the fathers would often be civil servants, economists, you know, fairly ordinary jobs in the monarchy, but their passions would be biology, zoology, science, electricity, usually something science-related. And the kids were indulged to an extraordinary extent.

So my prime candidate for this is a biologist called Paul Kammerer. And by the time he was twelve or fourteen, he had amassed this extraordinary collection of animals, dead and alive, including crocodiles, in his house, in his apartment, to study. And by the time he was in his teens, he was at the forefront of discovery, of scientific discovery in his chosen field. And he went on to make important contributions to evolutionary biology, particularly a branch of that called epigenetics. It really all started in his bedroom at home.

This was not an uncommon story. And the other thing that was very important was music. I mean, what linked all these people most comprehensively was music, the culture of the salon. There, they would gather for musical evenings, and anyone who aspired to any status in Viennese society would want to host a salon, and these were gatherings at people’s apartments, in the drawing rooms, to listen to music, and then to mingle. And there were various famous salons which brought together the most prominent writers, scientists, physicians, anatomists, artists of the day.

And that’s where you got this intellectual ferment of crossover, everybody talking to each other and interacting about the latest advances in their fields. And this was incredible. I’ll give you one example of this, which is being written about at the moment—the discoveries of these links is ongoing—was the artist Gustav Klimt, who was very well known for great canvases like The Kiss. But he was fascinated by the latest advances, particularly in medicine and particularly in anatomy and biology, and attended lots of lectures on the latest advances in anatomy and biology and incorporated a lot of this, what they were discovering under the microscope at the University of Vienna, into his pictures. All those apparently abstract shapes in famous paintings like The Kiss were in fact detailed copies of what was being published at the time, what they were seeing under the microscope, in terms of spermatozoa and reproductive cells, etcetera, to do with reproduction.

Very, of course, fertile material if you’re going to paint pictures like The Kiss, a pair of lovers intertwined. This cross-fertilization was very important. And just one other example: the writer Arthur Schnitzler, best known for his play La Ronde. I mean, he was basically trained as a doctor. His father was a surgeon, a great mentor was a physician.

So he was—and of course he then became a great follower of Freud in psychoanalysis. So he was absolutely steeped in the Viennese milieu of psychology, psychoanalysis, surgery, medicine of the day. I mean, Schnitzler is basically the natural sciences of the day on paper, so possessed was he by all this. So I think it was this remarkable fusion of disciplines, the lack of barriers between them, that made Vienna so remarkable at the time.

Because this was also a time when academia elsewhere was expanding, more colleges were being founded, universities, and at the same time it was all split into these narrow silos which we know and love today, whereby one academic will never speak to another academic. In Vienna it was actually very, very different, in a wonderful way, and it was, if anything, advancing in the opposite direction of making transfer of knowledge as fluid and open as possible. I think that was a huge contribution. And I haven’t mentioned the other great locus for this fusion of knowledge: the coffee house. So Vienna, of course, has its famous coffee houses.

All the great names would hold court at one or other coffee house during the day. And so for the price of a cup of melange, you could sit there in the afternoon and hear the great architect of the day or politician, whoever it was, musician, pontificating away on their favorite subject, which of course also encouraged the transference of knowledge and a sort of democratic openness. That’s part of Bildung as well.

Danny: This is really one of the most striking things, this utter and complete absence of the epistemic boundary policing that we’re so used to today. Conceptually, what explains how the Viennese got there? I mean, we can describe that fact.

Richard: That fact. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s two very obvious explanations. The first is the university education. So the University of Vienna, where most of these people went, only had four faculties at the time.

So it had a law faculty, where you went if you wanted to train in the law, of course. It had a medical and pharmacy faculty, where you went if you wanted to be a doctor, surgeon, or a chemist. It had a theology faculty, which was becoming smaller and smaller, where you went if you wanted to become a priest. And it had a philosophy faculty, the faculty of philosophy. So if you think about that for a minute, that meant that every other subject, if it wasn’t law, medicine, or theology, was taught together in the same faculty. So that meant the entire natural sciences, mathematics, science, physics, philosophy of science, etcetera, were taught alongside what we now call ancient history, classical studies, languages, history, economics, philosophy itself, all sorts of philosophy.

So there was this vast range of knowledge in the faculty of philosophy, and students were encouraged to roam throughout all these things because the fundamental purpose of philosophy is to study knowledge, the formation of knowledge, the roots of knowledge. That is what philosophy is about, and that’s what they were studying through the lens of all these different subjects. So it’s a completely different way of thinking about education than what we’re used to today. And again, if you read the memoirs of people like Hayek—Hayek, a philosopher, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974, he’s known as an economist—was brought up at home in an apartment by one of these autodidactic fathers who was so good at biology and zoology he wanted to be a professor of biology. He was a civil servant; he eventually took up a non-stipendiary, non-paying professorship at the University of Vienna.

So the young Hayek grew up steeped in biology, zoology, and basically scientific methodology. And these interests were his main interests for the rest of his life. And at the university, he studied a lot of ancient history, went to lectures on Greek theatre, he studied a lot of law. It was only towards the end that he began to narrow down and look at economics. So he had this vast range of subjects which he felt confident to write on and publish about, and this he did for the rest of his life.

He was very interested in psychology too, as all Viennese at the time were. So when he came over to England or America, the English and Americans found this range of knowledge breathtaking, and they called them polymaths. And the Viennese were often a bit bemused by this. And they said, well, it’s just what we learnt at the university. There’s nothing particularly special about this.

But what they didn’t know is that that education was very special. That was the standard setup at German-speaking universities, these four faculties. So that also occurred in German universities. But I think what also made Vienna special was that there were very few—again, you talk about all our epistemic barriers and boundaries—there were also very few boundaries in Vienna between the university and beyond the university. So many of the great names of that time—Freud, Ludwig von Mises, the founder of the modern Austrian School of Economics—they did not have full-time posts at the university.

Ludwig von Mises, for instance, was the main economist to the Chamber of Commerce for Lower Austria. So he had his office outside the university, but he taught. He was invited in to give lectures to the students, invited by the students. And all these great names held their own salons at home, to which were invited lots of people studying the same subject from the university or not from the university. So you had this very fluid mixture of academics, if you like, people studying the subject outside of academia, and people actually practically involved in the real-world application of all these ideas, all mixing, sharing the same spaces and discussing ideas.

And I think that made Vienna very unique. I mean, the three most famous examples are probably the Wednesday psychoanalytical club of Freud, Ludwig von Mises’s fortnightly economic seminar where Hayek and everyone sat around in his office to discuss the economic subject of the day. And there was a famous lawyer, jurist, Hans Kelsen. He had a similar gathering at his salon. Kelsen, again, switched between the university and practical work—for instance, he drafted the 1920 constitution, Austria’s First Republic, still in use today.

So again, a mixture of the purely academic and practical applications of those ideas to the Austrian constitution, etcetera. So as I say, there were no boundaries, very fluid movement of ideas and practical applications of those ideas. I think that was a very important aspect of the Viennese experience.

Danny: Now, you also talk about this in the book: there’s a dark side to this, or everything that you’ve been describing in a sense is agnostic as to the direction at which this intellectual firepower and all of this creativity is aimed. I think it was Odilo Globocnik, a Nazi party official, who was the first person to come up with the idea of industrial-scale mass murder. And this idea of industrial genocide was in a sense a very Viennese project too.

Richard: So all those great names I was just talking about, I mean, they operated in, I guess, what we now call a liberal bubble. So all this intellectual fervor, and they were allowed to do extraordinary things, was protected by the Habsburg Monarchy. That’s the irony of all this, that this liberal period was only made possible by the insistence of the autocratic emperor on liberalism. This was gradually changing from 1900 onwards. The reaction against this by what we’d now call ethno-nationalists—people who wanted to reclaim particularly a German culture from what they regarded as the pollution of Jewish and alien cultures—was really gathering steam from 1900 onwards. And certainly a bulwark against that was the emperor, Franz Joseph I, and his insistence on the liberal character of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the time—relatively liberal, I should say.

That’s true. But once that went, from the 1920s, fascism and Nazism gathered pace much more quickly. But people were less aware of that before 1914. After the First World War in particular, the university quickly became a bastion not of liberal thinking but of conservative thinking, conservative culture, resisting any appointment of women, Jews, and socialists to teaching positions at the university, which meant that an alternative, privately funded intellectual culture flourished in Vienna in the nineteen twenties alongside the official, increasingly conservative culture.

Danny: Speaking of partially privately funded culture, what made the Rockefeller Foundation apparently so good at identifying the right people to fund?

Richard: Yeah. I mean, the Rockefeller Foundation was amazing. So basically, they stepped in after the First World War. Austria in particular was devastated by the First World War. Vienna was impoverished.

It had mass inflation, famine basically, in Austria from about 1918 to 1921, 1922. It was in a terrible state, so poor that it was not required to pay reparations because everyone knew it had no money to repay reparations. And the Americans stepped in—American aid organizations, for instance, evacuating a lot of the children of Vienna to the countryside or other countries so that they wouldn’t starve to death. It was in this atmosphere that the Rockefeller Foundation came looking for talent, not only in Austria but they did this in Germany too and funded projects in Britain as well, for instance at the London School of Economics. But basically what the Rockefeller Foundation was doing was looking for talented individuals frustrated in Austria but who would have a lot to contribute to America.

So they were brilliant at talent-spotting young academics, young intellectuals in all fields—sociology, economics, philosophy, science—and giving them often one-year or two-year travelling scholarships to America or funding posts at American universities. And this was the beginning of that great pipeline of talent that emptied Central Europe to the United States, as well as, to a lesser extent, Britain, which I spent quite a lot of time on in my book. This has continued right up to the present day, although the Viennese now hope that under Trump, only now is it showing signs of going into reverse. That brain drain that started in about 1920 might finally go into reverse as everyone flees Trump, and there are a few signs of that. But this was incredibly important to America.

I mean, amazingly important when you look at how much of modern America in every field—all the achievements of those Central European refugees and exiles contributed to American culture. And I chronicle a lot of that in my book, but there’s a lot more on top of that. More often than not, it was the Rockefeller Foundation which started their journey to America. And in the 1930s, this was absolutely vital for many of them because they’d made their contacts in America through the Rockefeller Foundation. So when it was clear that they couldn’t go back to Austria or Central Europe because of the rise of the Nazis—and many of these were assimilated Jews—

They had the contacts and often positions in America which they could use or continue from 1938, 1939, the 1940s onwards. And of course, they then advised Rockefeller and other funders on the talent they knew existed in Austria and encouraged those people to join them in America, and posts were found for them in America. So the whole thing snowballed. A remarkably high proportion of Viennese talent got out of Vienna, much more so actually than Germany. I mean, again, to give you one example of that, there was a famous American sociologist called Paul Lazarsfeld who worked in New York for decades after the war.

And he first came to America in the early 1930s, I think late 1920s, on a Rockefeller Foundation scheme. His scheme was extended, etcetera. And then when it became obvious what was going to happen in Austria in the mid-nineteen thirties, he was in a position in America to get a whole load of other people, his friends from Vienna, into America, and he and his patrons got them all jobs, essentially saving them from the Holocaust. And they made extraordinary contributions to American business and culture. Just to give you two examples: one of those people was called Ernst Dichter, and he was really the founder of the modern American advertising industry in terms of applying psychology and psychoanalysis to advertising, marketing, design—an incredibly important figure in mid-century American consumer culture.

Together with his colleague Herta Herzog, who was at one time married to Lazarsfeld—she also invented the focus group, the modern focus group, for instance, and she was known as the Queen of Madison Avenue and again helped to invent the modern advertising industry. She has a walk-on part in Mad Men in the first episode as a little tribute. So, yeah, the Rockefeller Foundation was extraordinarily important at the time. And of course, they had a huge budget relative to the postwar poverty of Central Europe devastated by the First World War.

They had limitless funds to do all this, so it’s not surprising that many of the young Viennese availed themselves of the opportunities.

Danny: One of the things you also do in the book is contrast the strong Viennese commitment to empiricism and methodological rigor with the Frankfurt School critical theorists—Adorno, Marcuse, and others. And you joke—or maybe not—that the critical theorists only wanted to interpret the world, whereas the Viennese, as you pointed out, because they were engaged in practical endeavors, wanted to change it. But in retrospect, critical theory has been enormously influential, maybe more so in the past couple of decades. So today, who do you assess has actually won that intellectual battle, as it were?

Richard: I think this is an underexamined aspect of modern twentieth-century, twenty-first-century intellectual history. And that’s partly, of course, because in the West, because the Austrians speak German and the Viennese speak German, a lot of historians and commentators, when they look at Central European diaspora culture, the Viennese were always lumped in with the Germans. I have a stack of books I’m looking at now saying, “saving German-speaking refugees in Europe,” “German-speaking culture” and stuff. One of the points of writing the book was to state clearly that this is not the case, that Vienna had a very, very different intellectual culture from, say, Berlin or Germany. And in many ways, interwar culture was a constant dual rivalry between the Viennese—if you like, let’s call it the positivist culture—and the idealism of German high culture. This is the Heideggers of the period. The empirical culture of Vienna, let’s call it that, was much more akin to the Anglo-American way of thinking, particularly the British way, which is why so many of those Viennese came to Britain and felt very at home in the British intellectual culture.

Popper, Hayek, Gombrich, etcetera. They all came here and felt thoroughly at home here because to an extent, they modeled that culture on the British Enlightenment—Hume, Smith, Mill, etcetera—of the nineteenth century. But you’re absolutely right. I’m fascinated by this.

And to a certain extent, as soon as the Frankfurt School was born, they were dueling with the Viennese. So the Viennese philosophers of the Vienna Circle, they were taking on Heidegger and the early versions of the Frankfurt School. And this would continue. To a certain extent, the great works of the Frankfurt School after the Second World War were very much reactions against the empiricism of the Vienna School. So they were daggers drawn. Popper had these great famous debates with the Frankfurt School too.

And so did Lazarsfeld. They all had their run-ins with the dons of the Frankfurt School. So the Frankfurt School were basically—I mean, it’s a toss-up, isn’t it? Because the Frankfurt School were basically interested in society as a culture. That was their main point.

And I suppose, you know, the best, the most effective modern inheritors of the Frankfurt School in a way are the alt-right of America, because it was Steve Bannon and his acolytes who coined the phrase, “all politics is downstream from culture.” And that’s basically what the Frankfurt School was saying from the 1960s. So all those students on the barricades in 1968 were carrying their little—well, they carried Mao, but they carried their little Frankfurt School pamphlets saying, you know, the basic argument: yes, we might be drowning in material riches, but our culture is still authoritarian and Nazified, etcetera, and this is not true freedom. Whereas many of the Austrians, particularly the Austrian School of Economics, of course, really bore down and concentrated on political liberalism and economics as a way of raising prosperity, and that was the best way of ensuring the survival of a capitalist, open capitalist—to use Popper’s phrase—the open society. So there were absolutely clear dividing lines here.

Now who’s winning or who won? I mean, it’s a contest, isn’t it? Because I would argue that in today’s world, until Trump came along, the economic liberal consensus that Hayek started fighting for in 1947 with the founding of his first think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society—and that’s an open, liberal world economy protected by rules like those of the World Trade Organization. Most of these institutions were created by scions of the Austrian School or ordoliberals of the German school. That was very much the dominant mode of economic arrangements in the world. They had vanquished communism, they had vanquished socialism, they had vanquished protectionism.

So in that sense, I think they won. Culturally, of course, the Frankfurt School were probably much more significant in terms of being critical of consumer culture, of political notions of the Austrian school. So you had—and they were, in some ways, the two meshed in the late 1960s into schools such as libertarianism, which combined—and this is the irony—which combined the economic liberalism, the economic freedom advocated by the Austrian School of Economics with the New Left, Frankfurt School’s politics of liberation, in terms of sexual freedom, sexual orientation. Of course, that all feeds through now to the great trans debates, because the trans activists, very steeped in their New Left Frankfurt School rhetoric, advocate that everyone should have the right, the personal right, to decide their sexual orientation, indeed what sex they want to be, when they should change, etcetera, etcetera, and transgressing societal norms. That is the job of the vanguard of the Frankfurt School and philosophers, is to exactly transgress those societal norms, thus moving society on in a progressive direction.

So you can absolutely see where the Frankfurt School and the New Left have been very influential, but at the same time, so has the Austrian School and the empirical school. I think that’s why there’s such alarm about Trump: he’s the guy who’s come along and upended all the assumptions of the economic liberals and the Austrian school, the empiricists, going right back to von Mises when he started inventing the whole thing in 1920. So at the moment, we’re at an interesting tipping point because, of course, the populist right, they reject both the New Left and the Frankfurt School, their traditional conservatism back then, and the economic liberalism of the Austrian school. I mean, they reject the science-based empiricism, evidence-led stuff of the Vienna school as well, which is why the populist right is, I think, such a novelty. It’s innovative in that sense, and it’s so powerful.

So that’s how I interpret the grand flows of ideas. But I think the Austrian School found its foothold in Western culture because it stood very clearly for that empirical, liberal, economic, empirical culture that was threatened by fascism and communism, etcetera, in the nineteen thirties. Does that all make sense?

Danny: It does. And it strikes me that, one, you’ve talked about some of the—if you wish to call it that way—sort of failure modes, if you will, of the Frankfurt School. I think there’s also an undercovered, maybe, failure mode of the empiricist school where empiricism veers into scientism negatively understood, or cargo cult science, the way that Richard Feynman has described it. And it strikes me that one of the fascinating things about the Viennese scientific culture was how scholarly it was. And it strikes me that today, we could occasionally do with a bit more scholarliness and maybe a bit less emulation of scientific rigor, which then may not end up being particularly rigorous, in fact.

Richard: Yes. Popper himself was a great critic, of course, of the Vienna Circle philosophers. So the Vienna Circle was famous, important—this is Wittgenstein, etcetera—for importing empiricism into philosophy and thinking. And they wanted rigorous—they wanted an exactitude in language whereby everyone saw absolute clarity in conversation, etcetera. But as members of the Vienna Circle realized at the time, with the growth of fascism and Nazism, you can’t really talk about morality, evil, all these things with any exactitude.

And if you insisted on exactitude of language and ideology, then you couldn’t talk. You had no language to talk about all these things that actually seemed to matter very much to most people. I would call that now the language of feeling. And this is where—this was the gap through which mass movements such as Nazism came. And indeed Trump comes—that what they are good at is articulating people’s feelings, people’s resentments, etcetera.

And it’s astonishing to people like me, because it’s still astonishing, I’m afraid, I’m saying that Trump can get up and he just makes these statements. I say, well, none of that is true. If you look at the evidence, and we’ve tested this in the field, and of course, like everyone else does, and of course, it doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t matter if you inhabit the language of feeling, not the empirical. Well, then actually none of that matters. And what’s more important, the language of feeling is quite legitimate, it seems.

Empiricism is less important than the language of feeling, of evidence-led argument, etcetera. So those clashes still go on. Those were the clashes that the Vienna School were most involved in with the German school, with the German idealists and the Frankfurt School. My friend Anthony Gottlieb just published a new study of Wittgenstein. It goes back to why Wittgenstein was so fascinating: if you go back to his first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition seven, isn’t it?

Which there’s always—I mean, he’s supposed to be the epitome of the rigorous, hard, exact thinker trying to make language exact and order the whole of civilization and existence. But at the end, proposition seven says, you know, well, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. And it’s that proposition, it’s that thought, that is in fact the most famous Wittgensteinian thought, not the previous thousand-something propositions on how to make language more exact. And that, I think, is the dilemma, because that proposition seven leaves the door open to any old rabble-rousers to talk about the language of feeling. They began—and that was evident in Wittgenstein’s own time in Austria, where you had the beginnings of fascism, Nazism, with the early antisemitic politicians in Vienna, like the famous mayor Karl Lueger, who was the first European politician to weaponize antisemitism and make it into a political culture.

And he had, by all accounts, plenty of Jewish friends. So in some ways, he could say, it’s not personal, but I know that many of the people who will vote for me bitterly resent the wealth and privilege amassed by wealthy Jewish industrial families, like the Wittgensteins indeed, and I will articulate their resentments, and they will put me in city hall. That’s the way it works.

Danny: Now, that is one contemporary parallel that you’ve picked up now. Right? One reading of your book is the parallel with the assault on critical rationalism, which we are seeing today. There’s another parallel. There’s another way of reading it or another question to ask, in a sense, which is: where is the Vienna of today?

Of course. And it’s an obvious question. One of the obvious answers will be, well, probably somewhere in California and possibly in the San Francisco Bay Area, which, of course, also has benefited from Viennese emigres going there. What would your answer be? If someone was looking for the Vienna of today, where would one find it?

Richard: When I’m asked that, I say exactly what you’ve just said: somewhere near Palo Alto. Yes, I mean obviously, I think Silicon Valley would be a modern type of Vienna where it sucked in talent from all over the world, and you have this concentration, critical mass, lots of people—scientists, designers. Apple is a very good example of that, of this melange, this mix of scientists, designers, artists, mathematicians, algorithm makers, and pure entrepreneurs, meshed together, producing these extraordinary ideas, in this case machines, which have undoubtedly transformed the world at a rush in the past twenty years. So yes, absolutely. For Viennese, interestingly—now I go to Vienna quite a lot. They’re very interested. I get a lot of questions like, can we recreate this Viennese culture in the Vienna of today?

Some people have come back. The Viennese diaspora, as I said before, have started returning to try and do that. They sit in California in their traffic jams in LA thinking, why am I—I could be back in nice Vienna in the clear air of the mountains and having a nice calm journey on my very good Autobahn, not being clogged up on the freeways of California, and doing my science there. Some of them have chosen to do that, and I think it would be marvelous if they could, but Silicon Valley has a great critical mass. But the great threat to that, as we all know, is the American president himself, who—because he’s a populist rightist—doesn’t get the importance of knowledge transfer, of why immigration is so important.

If he paused for a minute and looked at how much of modern America has been built by, first, European immigrants and then much wider—Indian immigrants now, Chinese immigrants, South Korean immigrants—that should give him pause for thought, because if you choke off that flow of talent—Vienna, the creation of Vienna, was all about flow of talent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. No passports, complete freedom of movement, anyone could come there, and they did. That overwhelmingly is what made that culture of Vienna. And up to not so long ago, Silicon Valley benefited from the same sort of flows, a bit more difficult, but now Trump is, of course, tightening up the vital visas. The H-1B visa—tightening the rules for H-1B—and that’s the particular one you need to make America great again.

And so it’s a sort of policy of self-sabotage. But of course, going back to which political dispositions or beliefs you prioritize, that particular bit is not a priority because the populist right, they’re culture warriors. They’re New Lefties in their inverted universe. They’re Frankfurt School politicians in the sense that they’re culture warriors, and that takes priority over economics and over economic growth and economic activity. So that sort of makes perfect sense.

But I think, not to be too gloomy, I think San Francisco and the corridor there, of course, is so huge and at the moment it’s had such an overwhelming preponderance of talent and inventiveness that I think you’d really have to double down to destroy it or at least stop it, perhaps. But no, I would say the same as you. I mean, India could be, with that sort of extraordinary talent. But, again, most Indians go abroad. It hasn’t got the knack yet of attracting people to come and work in those hotspots like Bengaluru.

Danny: What should I have asked but didn’t?

Richard: I think you’ve been pretty comprehensive. I mean, the only thing I would say, again, is—for somebody, one reviewer of my Vienna book said it’s both a warning and an inspiration. Those are the two sides. One of the important lessons for me of Vienna culture, this glorious culture of the beginning of the twentieth century into the twenties and thirties, is that very—I was going to say very few—nobody saw the Holocaust coming. Nobody saw the reality of Nazism coming.

From the nineteen twenties, many of these great progressive minds, they were not getting jobs at the university, they were not getting the opportunities they would have got a generation or two earlier. For as Austro-fascism and fascism were taking hold of Central Europe, they would be told sometimes, you know, well, I’m afraid it’s antisemitism at the university, you’re Jewish. And they often refused to believe it and said, but this is Austria, land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is the country that has done the most for Jewish culture, for Jews, of anywhere in Europe over the past fifty, seventy years. And many of them—so the scales would fall from their eyes far too late.

And it’s amazing, in retrospect, how quickly things turned against them—that this culture, this extraordinary pre-First World War culture, capsized within one generation, where the capital city that had produced this glittering, progressive, humane, modernist culture was absorbed into the greater Germany and was run by Nazis only a generation later. So I think there’s a lesson in there that you have to keep your eyes open and the two sides have to talk to each other. The liberal empiricists, etcetera, knew nothing of what the other side was thinking. They were very dismissive of it. Whereas the fascists, etcetera, because they had no way into the dominant liberal culture at the time, their only reaction therefore could be resentment, hatred, jealousy.

All these—I go back to the politics of feelings—that fed Austro-fascism, Nazism, and eventually the Holocaust. So it is a cautionary tale as well that if you don’t give—provide these sorts of cultures with solid constitutional political guardrails, then they can be threatened very quickly. You have to be very aware that things can change very quickly. So you need that sort of deep institutional grounding. And of course, America is now the test case for all this.

With Trump there, he wants to tear up all the rules. Will the guardrails, to a degree, limit the damage?

Danny: We will find out. Finally, which book are you writing next?

Richard: Well, actually, I’m going to Vienna in a couple of months. I’m taking up a fellowship at the IWM in Vienna. And having thought quite a lot about the populist right, I’m actually writing a book on the intellectual roots, cultural roots of the populist right, the history of the populist right, how we got here, where I do want to delve more deeply into exactly those contrasts between empiricism and the politics of feeling, where ethno-nationalism came from, etcetera, etcetera. But mine is a world study, so I want to look at not just America, more obviously Europe—you know, Hungary and Italy, etcetera—but also India, Russia in particular, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and see who copied what from whom.

So that is the next book.

Danny: I’ll be sure to read that. Thank you very much, Richard.

Richard: Thank you very much, Danny. It was great. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Danny: Thanks for listening to High Variance. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this podcast, please give us a rating and leave a review. This makes a big difference, particularly for newer podcasts like this one.