Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars | 118 ratings

Price: 18.8

Last update: 10-02-2024


About this item

How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?

Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.

The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact.

Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna's rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.


Top reviews from the United States

Niala
5.0 out of 5 stars an amazing history of ideas springing from the casual encounters only possible in a large multicultural city!
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2024
What a wonderful book! The author is able to survey the fertile ideas of hundreds of thinkers and activists often opposed to each other, without being biased and taking sides! Crockett discuss and explains clearly the ideas behind Red Vienna and the Mont Pèlerin Society without taking sides! This is a masterpiece illustrating the fertility of a large city under a benign government!
phytodoer
4.0 out of 5 stars overwhelms with information, especially names!
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2024
I greatly appreciated the in-depth learning about a wondrous period of intellectual ferment -- & the jingoistic/bigoted undercurrent that was there from the beginning & eventually (1930s) suppressed the ideas and the people.
Sometimes the tidal wave of "who was there doing what" was overwhelming.
A M
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant history of culture
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2024
Why is history interesting? One reasonable answer is that history explains how we arrived at the current situation. This is precisely what this book brilliantly does. It reviews the cultural activity in Vienna from the end of the 19th century till the Second World War and shows how this activity has influenced the current culture.
Ethan Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars Fun to Learn about the rise and fall of Austria
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2024
Great read on the Vienna Circle and all that happened in pre war Vienna. After finishing it, I've pursued quite a few authors that were spoken of within this book.
Paul Y. Gelman
5.0 out of 5 stars The shaping of the Western world by Vienna
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2023
This book is a kind of summary, containing various chapters about how Vienna and its intellectuals have shaped the West from the fin-de-siecle days of the 19th century to our times. The book is divided into three sections. What is very original here is the chapter which describes for the first time the role women intellectuals ,who were first regarded as inferior, but later on were seen as pioneers in the various fields of science ,psychology, etc, had. Read about Hedi Lamarr ! yes, the famous actress whose inventions are talked about here. And also the rabid anti-Semitism which has only enriched the West, mainly Britain and the USA, after so many geniuses have emigrated before and after the Nazi annexation of Austria.This is an intellectual excursion which merits to be taken and read a number of times. Bravo!!
Christian Schlect
4.0 out of 5 stars The Red and the Black
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2023
The many and varied and amazing intellectual, scientific, and social influences that originated in--and then radiated out--from the old imperial capital are discussed here in clear, lively prose. An important substory is that of the Jews; why they originally thrived in Austria and then about the discrimination they increasingly suffered.

Given the author's position as an editor at The Economist, it should come as no surprise that a good part of the book focuses on the grand economic thinkers who at one time called Vienna home.

In a book of this sort it would be impossible to cover every important intellectual figure of the last century who came from Vienna, but one glaring absence, to my mind, is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

As an aside, I think the book's jacket design by Jack Smith is excellent.
Henry Bayerle
3.0 out of 5 stars Great book. Terrible narrator.
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2024
Fascinating overview of the far-reaching influence of a cultural moment in Vienna. Why, why could you not have found a narrator who can pronounce German words? It isn't just that he mangles almost every word in any language other than English; he doesn't even do it in a consistent way. Every time he comes across a non-English word or name, he manages to mis-pronounce it in a different way. The resulting tour de force of gibberish, while it may be interesting on a psycho-linguistic level, makes it impossible to know how to spell the names of authors, places, and institutions mentioned in the book. Many of these names are already familiar to me, but the new names, which should be a benefit of listening to this book, are indecipherable.
D F McLawhorn
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing historty
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2024
The examination of the genesis of much of current social and cultural fabric now in place for Western civilization was illuminating and well written.

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