STRUCTURE AND GESTALT to be the director of the bank. In her estimation he would not sink, no matter how much his image had otherwise been dented. THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS: NOTES ON AUSTRIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY FROM BOLZANO TO WITTGENSTEIN Barry Smith §1. The internal front §2. Bernard Bolzano: logic and the theory of science §3. On nationalities of a higher order §4. The movement of human capital The present paper takes the form of a series of sketches of 19th century Austrian political and intellectual history, allied with a number of reflections of a more general nature which it is hoped will contribute to our understanding of some of the peculiar characteristics of Austrian thought, particularly Austrian philosophy and economics, in the period in question. This concern with historical background should not be taken to imply sympathy with any view which would relativise the truth of a doctrine or the validity of an argument to the context within which it is produced. The suggestion is simply that it may be impossible to grasp, say, a philosophical theory which originated within an alien culture, without some understanding of that culture and of the forces within it which may have contributed to the development of the theory. All too often the temptation is simply to ig-* nore this background in the belief that one may thereby produce an unprejudiced (context-free) understanding of the 212 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT theory in question, where what is obtained is often merely an interpretation, within the framework of one's own expectations, from which all but the barest trace of the original doctrine has been lost. This may as, notoriously, in the case of Anglo-Saxon interpretations of the later Wittgenstein lead to the development of a prestigious body of theory; but the task remains, in all such cases, to compare interpretation with original, and this leads back to historical investigations of the type attempted here. §1. Th e in t e pnal fron t As is by now well-understood, the citizen of a German state in Metternich's day inhabited a world bearing little resemblance to the scientifically conceived universe of the present day. He would feel himself subservient to a system of forces emanating from God, and permeating the world through God's chosen Emperor, Elector or Prince. He would take for granted a web of absolute limitations upon his freedom of thought and action, set by custom, by common opinion, and by the scaffolding of law,l and this would determine his experience of the natural world as of a closed, finite whole. The citizen would conceive himself and would be conceived by those set in authority over him as having a proper business and a proper place and station within this whole, beyond which he was not expected, nor indeed allowed, to tread. 2 Thus the prince alone was the locus of political authority; the people, either collectively or as individuals, played no role in the political life of the state. There was no suggestion that the citizen may properly seek to influence his ruler, for example, or that the ruler ought properly to seek the opinions of his citizens. THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 213 The rights of the citizen were exhausted, in effect, in this, that he was allowed to be the subject of the prince (though this, too, was a right which might at any time be rescinded and the individual banished from the state). Perhaps the most convincing depiction of a world experienced as subject to this scaffolding of law is contained in Kleist's novel Michael Kohlhaa s. Kleist reveals how deeply embedded was the assumption that the prince, as the representative of God on earth, was an intrinsically adequate guarantor of justice, that injustice in the society could therefore ensue only from errors of his agents, which could be rectified if they coul d be rectified without question, upon petition to the prince. Apparent injustices which could not be righted in this manner thereby proved themselves to be not injustices at all, but higher forms of justice, constituent elements of a larger plan, unintelligible to the citizen and therefore not, on any account, subjectable to question or criticism. This state of resignation of the members of a society will not, of course, withstand all forms of behaviour on the part of their ruler. It calls, rather, for the conscious or unconscious adoption on his part of a quite specific form of conservatism, constructed around the idea of preserving this system of expectations. It demands, for example, the taking of measures against the growth in influence of liberal elements whose views would tend to call into question the edifice of relations of trust within the society, and it calls forth also political opposition to new ideas, to scholarship, and to science, all of which might undermine the world upon which the edifice is built. It would not be too much of an over-simplification to say that, largely thanks to the political skills of his chancellor 214 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT Metternich, the Emperor of Austria, still at that time the most powerful of all the German princes, was able to impose this kind of conservatism upon much of Europe for a period of three decades leading up to 1848. Specifically, the Empire was able to exert pressure upon the principali ties of ausser~st erreiehische s Deu tsehland 3 in order to gain their support for a policy which consisted, in effect, in the holding in place of everything on the map of Europe as it then stood, and particularly of the preservation of the patchwork of small German principalities which was believed to constitute an artificial check upon the expansion of any islands of liberal (or messianical or nationalistic) sentiment which might come to be established. This constituted the external aspect of the Metternichsystem imposed jointly by Austria and Prussia upon each other and upon the remaining German states. The internal policy of the system was based upon the principle of establishing at all levels within the society what were called internal fr onts against the growth of radicalism. Here it is not our purpose to reach a judgment concerning the rights or wrongs of this policy. Certainly it now seems, in retrospect, that Germany may have profited from the early growth of liberalism which Metternich perhaps prevent ed, since this might have enabled democratic institutions within that country to have become entrenched sufficiently to withstand the rise of fascism a century later. But what might safely have been risked within the German states, where all citizens shared a common language and a common background of traditions and institutions, might well have led to disaster in Austria, where the continually pressing need of those in authority was simply to hold together within the Empire a mixture of peoples at different stages of development and having conflicting interests and tradTHE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 215 itions. In practice, the internal policy of the Metternichsystem consisted in the imposition of an elaborate system of controls of all public gatherings and associations, censorship of the press and of the mails, regulation of aliens , of travel, of place of residence, and so on. One predictable consequence of these overt controls was that such political groups as continued to exist were driven underground, and were constrained, where normal forms of political persuasion had been made imposSible, to turn to subversion. After 1848 this was met by the authorities by the formation of new , political arms of the police, and the Empire came to be criss-crossed at all levels with a system of spies, granted powers which included blackmail , torture and ~sassination. Again, the granting of such powers expressed a deep-seated view of the relation between the Emperor and his peoples as something comparable to the relation between the father of a large family and his children: the father who may find it necessary, in times of need , to take measures for the protection of his children which might to them seem extraordinary. Thus arms of the police were established also with the task of preserving public hea lth ( Hyge in epoZizei) and morals ( SittenpoZizei) . In some states the police took upon themselves the task of maintaining emergency food-depots as a means of preventins uprisings which might be fomented by shortages of food.4 There was established an extremely complicated system of passports and registration of domicile, responsibility for which was exercised by the Pos spoZizei , and this enabled the authorities again in their role as fathers of the people to determine the precise wherea bouts of any citizen at any time. (Those same authorities prided themselves upon the fact that no one could get lost within the Empire.) 216 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT A not incidental benefit of the fact that all journeys and all changes of address were subject to official approval and registration was that it became possible for politically suspect individuals to be isolated from those centres of population where they might do most damage. To the members of such a family, accustomed at every turn to feel the protective hand of their paternal Emperor, the opponent of the state appears as something inexplicable. And not being capable of understanding the mentality which might lead certain types of individuals under certain circumstances to agitate or rebel, the authorities find it sufficient to conceive all such individuals indiscriminately as 'destructive elements' and allow themselves to recognise no distinctions between those among them who were motivated by say liberalism or nationalism, and those motivated merely by some petty local or personal grievance. All such individuals were conceived in their totality as something partaking of the nature of a cancerous growth, against which all measures on the part of the civil and political police seemed justified. But not only were the people shielded in this way from dissident or eccentric individuals. A ring of protection was constructed to shield them also from new ideas. Metternich's system involved not only the censorship of the press, but made room also for a policy of nurturing established and accepted opinions through a network of state information bureaux. Censorship was applied further in the arts, particularly the theatre, and there arose in response a tendency for artists to revert to classical forms, to that which had been tried and tested. 5 But this ring of protection was applied with most serious effect to the universities, for even there, because of the danger of infection, new ideas THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 217 were to be prevented from taking root. The principles of such Protektion were expressed by Franz I in an address to the professors of the newly founded University of Laibach: Be faithful to the old, for this is also the good. It is not scholars that I require, but honest, rightly-formed citizens. Whoever serves me must teach as I command; whoever cannot do this, or comes with new ideas, can go or I will see that he is removed. Regulation of the universities was exercised in practice by administrators sponsored by the political police, and specifically by the use of officially approved textbooks or manuals, usually neither original nor scholarly, which presented their content within a framework designed primari l y to draw out its practical (ethical) consequences. By various means, including the employment of spies among the students, it was ensured that individual teachers adhered rigidly to the content of the textbooks which had been prescribed. Not even the rapidly evolving natural sciences served as seedbeds of dissent, as had been the case in other parts of Europe. The majority of students were in any event engaged in the study of law, or of some related discipline, in preparation for an almost inevitable career in the imperial civil service. The predictable result of all of this, of course, was a virtual stagnation of intellectual activity in the Empire. Almost no achievement of note in the pure sciences was produced in any Austrian university until Carl Menger's Grund s~tz e der VoZkswi r tscha f tsleh r e , which initiated new and important ideas in the field of economic theory. This was published in 1871, by which time many of the residual effects of absolutistic control of the universities had 218 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT been allowed to disappear. It should not however be assumed that the controls adopted are to be universally condemned. They enabled Austrian universities to withstand successively the Kantian, Hegelian, and various derivative metaphysical systems which had done so much dam~ge to generations of students in German universities outside the Empire. Austria, indeed, served in many respects as the last intellectual outpost of the Latin renaissance traditioñ She was thus able to preserve the insights and assumptions of classical and scholastic philosophers (particularly of Aristotle whose works formed a significant part of the curriculum of the Austrian classical Gymnasien and of the Spanish scholastics 7 ) and I want to claim this contributed greatly to the fertility of her thinkers in the subsequent decades. It is impossible, for example, to understand Menger's work, and to comprehend the nature of the opposition between Austrian economic theory and historicist economics as then practised in Germany, except by reference to the system of Aristotelian-scholastic assumptions which permeated the intellectual life of the Empire in the period.8 §2. Bernard Bolzano: Logic and the theory of science The ideas of the preceding section are well-illustrated by the case of Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848), another Austrian thinker profoundly influenced by Aristotelian modes of thought and perhaps the most brilliant philosopher to have been produced by the Empire as a whole. 9 Bolzano made important contributions not only to philosophy, to theology and social theory, but was responsible also for significant insights in logic and the foundations of mathematics. Much of his work, however, consisted of largely ephemeral THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 219 contributions to the various religious and theological disputes pervading central Europe at that time. Despite the relative security of Prague, where Imperial surveillance was less effective and taken less seriously than in the capital of the Empire, Bolzano found himself the victim of frequent attacks from both the political and religious establishments, the suspicion of the authorities having been encouraged, for example, by his refusal to use an officially recommended textbook in his courses, and by the fact that he served as the spokesman for the more liberal wing in religious disputes. He was finally discredited officially by being blamed for student unrest which had broken out in a local theological seminary. He was dismissed from his chair by Emperor Franz in 1819 and in the remaining thirty years of his life he never again held a teaching position. During this period Bolzano developed the philosophical ontology which is presented in his WissenschaftsZehre (1837), virtually the only major scientific achievement of the Metternich era in Austria. This work, although it partakes of many of the characteristics of the Austrian university textbook in the sense of §1. above,including a pedantic concern for the correction of previous views on each of the topics discussed, an encyclopedic (Aristotelian) format, and an evident lack of concern for either stylistic sophistication or conceptual profundity for their own sakes was far from constituting a typical representative of its species. It was much more itself the record of a scientific investigation of the concept textbook and a disquisition on the c on s truc ti on of textbooks and therefore also on the recognition and demarcation (by mortal man) of bodies of (eternal) scientific truths. Hence the central thesis of the work is the necessity of distinguishing between the 220 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT transient realm of human knowledge, of thoughts, impressions, and artefacts of language, and a further realm, consisting of eternal abstract in telligi bilia , which Bolzano called 'propositions in themselves', 'theories in themselves', 'truths in themselves', 'falsehoods in themselves', and so on. Propositions in themselves, for example, represent the objective, intelligible content of actual and possible individual sentence-using acts (acts of judgment). Theories in themselves represent the objectively delineated totalities of propositions in themselves which would correspond to correctly constructed textbooks. Each entity in itself is held to exist (have being) outside both space and time, and absolutely independently of whether it is understood, recognised, acknowledged, or grasped in any way by any thinking subj ect. (Indeed Bolzano stressed that his originality in relation to 'platonist' thinkers who had preceded him consisted in the fact that whilst they had all of them regarded 'universals', or 'ideas', or 'forms' as standing in a relation of dependence upon or of necessary accessibility to our thinking (of) them, he himself had affirmed the existence of an absolute gulf between the realm of concrete thinking acts and the objective totality of inteZ ligi bili a which he conceived himself to have discovered. What, now, can be said about the historical origins of Bolzano's ontology? Present-day thinkers may find it difficult to conceive the effects which a threatened collapse of one's nation, or of one's religion, may have on the range of theories and arguments which might seem meaningful or important. The fact that the associated ideas of national and religious consciousness are so unfamiliar to and are regarded so unsympathetically by modern intellectuals may hold them back from a complete understanding of a thinker whose work has been coloured, even in part, by the existence of such a THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 221 threat. Even in the case of Bolzano, I would argue, we have an example of a philosopher whose recognition of the religious and political instability of the society in which he lived, and of the impossibility of shoring up that society by means of practical reforms, determined his thought in a way which contributed to his conception of an idealised alternative world, freed of the possibility of conflict and of decay, a world which would serve as a substitute for the hitherto unquestioned Catholic intellectual world-picture the crumbling apart of which he and his contemporaries were beginning to experience through the schisms of the period.l 0 What is remarkable in Bolzano's case is that in developing this ontology he succeeded in establishing the foundations of a theory of logic which brougoctogether very many highly original and fruitful insights, some of which have only recently, with the development of mathematica: logic, been recognised for their true worth. §3. On nat ionaliti e s of a highe r orde r During the second half of the 19th century each of the four great German cities of central Europe (Vienna, Prague, Buda and Pest) experienced a severe decline in the political dominance of its middle-class German and German-speaking Jewish populations. The culture and intellectual effects of this decline in the case of Vienna have been well-documented by Schorske,11 Johnston,1 2 and others,1 3 who have demonstrated how, especially after the loss of their political power through abrupt re-establishment of authoritarian rule in the second half of the century, there arose a tendency amongst members of the Viennese middle classes to turn to literary, artistic and related fields, effectively in order to fill the resulting psychological and economic gap in their lives. 222 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT The German middle classes of Budapest and Prague however suffered no such sudden loss of power. They experienced rather a steady increase in the political activity of the various more or less anti-German communities about them, and a gradual recognition of the need to come to terms with these communities. In Hungary this gave rise to an unparalleled merging or melting away of all that had been peculiarly German into the Magyar background . This submission of one culture to another quite distinct from the more familiar phenomenon of an individual immigrant adopting the culture of a host country is of much psychological and historical interest; indeed it might seem to offer a model, if only it could be repeated at will, for the solution of one particularly intransigent type of political problem. Of course the con ditions which made it possible were by no means simple in character, and certainly not of the kind which can be artificially re-created . The success of Magyarisation depended first of all upon the guileless and singleminded resolution of the Hungarians themselves that it should be brought about, a resolution which expressed itself at all levels within the society, and even determined the strategy adopted by Hungary in its contribution to the formation of the Imperial foreign policy. It depended upon the readiness of t he more chauvinistically German Germans to emigrate, even at the expense of abandoning ties and privileges acquired in Hungary; and it depended further upon the willingness of those who remained to fall into line, to accommodate themselves to the process of Magyarisation (which typically involved the adoption of both a Hungarian name and of the Hungarian language, at least for public use). This may in some cases have reflected a certain conformist strain in the German character, but it reflected also a desire on the part of many Germans to hold THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 223 on to status and possessions and to a familiar environment even at the cost of their national identity. Finally other, apparently quite independent factors also played a role: for instance the desire of some Austrians in Hungary particularly after the 1914-18 war to make a personal gesture of contempt for German (that is, in this context, particularly Prussian) ways.14 The German-speaking communities of Bohemia and Moravia exhibited a quite different reaction to the withering away of their political power and administrative responsibility. Far from bringing about the submission of one culture to another , as in Hungary, there took place amongst the Czechs a peculiar splitting of cultures, poignantly expressed in the splitting of the University of Prague into independent Czech and German faculties in 1880 . For with the growth in number and authority of the Slavs around them, the Germansin Prague seem to have adopted a peculiar cultural seige mentality and to have embarked upon a deliberate attempt at intellectual and cultural self-preservation.15 This led to the creation of a uniquely fertile intellectual environment within which a number of important philosophers, social theorists and writers found a home.16 As already stated, our assumption is that it is sometimes necessary to consider a philosophy and its social and cultuml background as more or less inseparable components (moments ) of a single whole , that at least in some cases the two are , in the terminology of the phenomenologist, co-realising correlates. From this point of view the issues before us suffer complications of a special kind in comparison with what would be invo lved in an investigation of the philosophy or letters of, say, England or Russia, each of which is in an important sense both politically and culturally self224 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT sufficient. For the German-P.ohemian community stood in an obvious relation of dependence upon the wider Austro-Hungarian culture, which was in its turn at least partially dependent upon the culture of the German Reich. Thus the Gennan-Bohemian communi ty was, so to speak, a na tionali ty of a higher order in relation to both Austria and Germany. Parallel complications are created also by the existence within each of these societies of more or less self-contained communities of Jews, who constituted a different kind of higher order national grouping (or system of such groupings) in the central Europe of the later 19th century. As we shall see, one important mechanism in the establishment and consolidation of political and cultural dependence-relations amongst national groupings turns upon the emigration from one region to another. In this regard it is interesting to note how many of the most important Bohemian and Moravian emigrants to AUstria and Germany among them Zimmermann, Husserl, Mahler, Bohm-Bawerk, Kraus, Freud, Loos, Kelsen, and Schumpeter were Jews. It is unfortunately impossible to provide here even the briefest account of all the many conflicting religious, political, cultural and historical factors which led to the peculiar status of the Jew, and particularly of the Jewish liberal intellectual, in Europe at that time.17 We shall however claim that considerations such as those which follow apply no less to Jewish than to other communities of the period. §4. The movement of human capital Dependence-relations between nationalities and other groupings, whereby the politics and culture of one community is wholly or partly determined by another, are not, of THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 225 course, exclusive to Austria-Hungary. Indeed it would be possible to formulate certain principles pertaining to the correlation between political and economic subservience and cultural dependence amongst national groupings which would rest, in the end, upon the principles governing the formation of markets in human and intellectual capital in developed societies.IS Here we can do no more than sketch one or two of these principles and provide some indications as to how a complete account may be developed. We note, first of all, the existence of a network of motivations on the part of the individual members of such groupings which are, in the most general sense, economic in character. Individuals of talent tend, it seems clear, to be drawn to particular centres of high income and of concentration of population, simply because it is there that the tools and services of the artist or thinker libraries and publishing houses, universities and galleries, newspapers and newspaper offices, theatres and concert halls, coffee houses and restaurants are most readily accessible, and where his potential mentors and competitors, in the form of other artists and thinkers speaking an intelligible language, are to be found.19 This clearly serves to create a wide gulf between cosmopolitan centres and their surrounding areas, but it serves also to create conditions within which an order of ranking may come to be established amongst the centres themselves (and, derivatively, amongst the national groupings which they may represent) . The existence of such an order of ranking in Europe at the turn of the century is well-illustrated by the rise of Mahler up the hierarchy of his profession, from his first conductor's post in Bad Hall, through Laibach, Olmlitz, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg and Vienna, to his final winters in New York. The primary .mechanism in 226 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT the creation of hierarchies of this kind is clearly the ability of larger and more prosperous centres to bid away talent from their smaller and less prosperous neighbours. This brings about a range of secondary effects, as potential audiences, students, disciples and other associated hangerson of such talent are attracted in its wake. A complex network of systems of concentric circles of influence is thereby established: Berlin, for example, predominates over other Prussian centres; Vienna predominates over Prague, which predominates in turn over BudweiB and Brunn. And whilst there are perhaps no strongly felt cultural dominance relations between,say, Berlin and Vienna, it can yet be said that Germany as a whole predominates over Austria as a whole, as Great Britain, say, predominates over Ireland and its other Imperial Dominions. One powerful precondition for an intellectual dominance relation between centres is a common language (a precondition which, for obvious reasons, has less force in the visual arts; consider the position of Paris as a training and marketing centre for painters in respect to, say, the towns and cities of Spain and the Netherlands). Yet in some cases a community of language may be established artificially: compare the use of Latin, and subsequently German (now also Russian?) amongst Hungarian writers, and the virtual disappearance, to the benefit of English, of Gaelic and Welsh as literary languages. Since transaction costs amongst intellectuals are at a minimum when all the workers in a given field accept and understand a common language, there is a powerful tendency at least in periods of relative peace, when the relevant processes are not hindered by other, divisive forces towards the dominance of a single language in all intellectual centres. (Again Latin, which has of course until very recently remained the THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 227 official language of the Church, is an obvious example; compare also the role of German in the field of psychopathology, and of English, increasingly,in all remaining disciplines.) A second precondition for such a relation is the possibility of more or less free movement of human capital between the centres in question. Thus dominance relations are established almost automatically between the cities of a single state, even of a multi-national state such as the Habsburg Empire. They will however be established only imperfectly, if at all, where freedom of movement across frontiers is impeded. Thus switzerland has almost certainly cut herself off from the main currents of intellectual and artistic life of Europe by the rigid restrictions which she has imposed upon the employment of aliens within her borders. h can be concluded concerning the standards What, ten, of intellectual and artistic production in the more dominant centres (that is, in the centres where both monetary and ps ychic incomes are relatively high)? Would it be correct to assume that there intellectual product is in all respects o f a higher quality than in subservient centres? A moment's reflection upon certain obvious examples will show that this is not the case. Once again there are economic forces at work which will give rise, in the course of time, to a certain characteristic conformism in the former and to a high degree of innovation and experiment _ accompanied by a large amount of noise 20 in the latter. An interesting comparison can be made with the opposition between mature and immature industries in the sphere of production of material goods. Mat~re industries are 228 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT characterised by high incomes and low profits, as specialists who have reasons of their own for resisting nontrivial innovations in their respective fields compete against each other in the production of well-entrenched ranges of goods of high surface brilliance which have evolved to the point where they are in fundamental respects identical. Immature industries, in contrast, are characterised by high risk, and thus also by high profits and losses, since they consist in the production by highly inventiv e or eccentric individuals of new and unfamiliar goods, often lacking in outward refinement. Many of these goods will prove unmarketable; some few, however, will serve to determine the mature industries of the future. Putting this distinction to work in the sphere of intellectual and artistic production we can say that the associated communities and institutions in the relatively dominant regions say England in relation to Ireland or Australiai Germany in relation to Austria or Denmark; Austria in relation to Bohemia or Slovenia will tend to take on more of the characteristics of mature industries than will their counterparts in the more subservient regions. 21 Individuals and publishing houses in the latter will tend to take more risks, to exhibit greater extremes of quality, and to place greater weight upon what, in the material sphere, would be called advertising. And the best such individuals may experience the pressure to migrate to the ~elatively conformist and relatively secure) centres of high income, where their talents can, within certain limits, be more fruitful ly employed. Thus a Joyce, or a Wilde, or a Shaw, is unthinkable as a wholly English phenomenon. And we can perhaps begin to understand some of the reasons for the apparently cyclical THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 229 development of philosophy,2 2 and for the production in the great German universities of a homogeneous range of grandiose metaphysical systems. We can begin also to see why such a high proportion of the artistic and intellectual innovations produced within the German-speaking world both for the good and for the bad should have had their origin in Austria, and not least in the peripheral cities of the Empire. And we can understand also why Austria should have gained the not wholly deserved reputation of having culpably mistreated her most distinguished sons by allowing them to leave for more congenial or more prestigious climes, and by failing (through lack of appropriate specialists of her own) to recognise their greatness until this has been pointed out by others. Note s 1. Cf . Marcic, 1968, and Smith, 1978. 2. In a future paper I hope to show in detail how this frame of mind came gradually to be transformed into the exaggerated passion for the law which is characteristic of the work of Kafka or of Kraus. Provisionally it might be said that this transformation reflects the passage from a time in which a faith in the God-given order of the world is generally shared by all the members of a society, to a time when only the barest remnants of such a faith are possessed by certain isolated individuals. 3. There are Turkish drinking songs still to be heard in the bars of Istambul lamenting the loss of Sicily to the Italians. A mental shift from the cartographical provincialism of the late 20th century of almost equal magnitude is needed in order to understand this concept of 'extra-Austrian Germany'. For whilst Austria (i.e., crudely, the German-dominated regions of the Habsburg Empire) was not strictly speaking a German principality, it could yet look back to common ethnic, cultural and of course linguistic origins with the prinCipalities, something which was exploited politically by the Pan-German movement in Austria in the half-century leading up to Hitler's Ansch[uss. The idea of a peculiarly Austrian culture or literary tradition was vehemently rejected by Kraus, for example, and it is only comparatively recently that the arguments for the existence of such a culture, as of a distinctively Austrian philosophy, psychology, or economics, could coherently and diSinterestedly be assembled. 230 STRUCTURE AND GESTALT 4. The idea of a universal state welfare or dole however gained little foothold in Habsburg Austria. where it would have been regarded as alien to the principles of Christian charity. It is interesting how many of the institutional proposals put forward by Hayek. for example in his 1979. recall features of Habsburg society. His suggestions for state provision for the improvident as an insurance policy against revolution springs to mind, as somewhat more trivially does his proposal for the establishment of 'associations of contemporaries', which surely derives from his experiences of the Geistkreise so common in pre-War Austria. 5. This tendency is discernible even in those. such as Grillparzer. who were willing to risk conflict with the censor. 6. A list of law professors at the University of Vienna in the 16th century given by Marcic includes, for example. a certain Michael O'Lynch (op.cit .• p.122) . 7. See the useful survey by Rothbard, 1976, and also Marcic, op.cit. It is useful to note also that the works of Pufendorf were extensively used as textbooks in the Austrian universities. The issues discussed here are somewhat complicated by the Thun reforms of the Austrian law faculties after lB4B. It nevertheless remains true that the ontological (as distinct from ethical) framework presupposed within Austrian and even German jurisprudential writings in the period up to 1930 has predominantly Aristotelian features. See e.g. Engisch, 1953, esp. ch.5, and also the remarks in Smith and Mulligan, 19Bo. B. Cf. e.g. Hutchinson, 1973, but note the criticisms in Bostaph, 197B. Austrians themselves have characteristically underestimated the importance of this Aristotelian background since of course having shared in it themselves they take so many of its elements for granted. Thus Hayek reports (in conversation with the author) that he had initially reacted with ridicule to the suggestion that Menger's thought exhibited certain features of Aristotelianism. 9. Here, and elsewhere, I am indebted to Johnston's book (1972) for providing the starting point of my reflections. 10. Cf. also Nyiri, 1974, for a further development of this interpretation. 11. See his 1960/61 and 1966/67. 12. Op.cit. 13. See especially Ny1.ri, op.cit., and also his 1976. 14. A number of interesting comments on these issues are to be found in the (unpublished) memoirs of Aurel Kolnai. See also the paper by Kolnai published in the present volume. 15. Thus in 1900 the Germans in Prague, who by then constituted as little as 7.5% of the population, retained for their own exclusive use several secondary schools, a university and technical college, two theatres, a concert hall, two daily newspapers, and a number of clubs. THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS 231 16. Besides Kafka and Brod and the various groups of writers with whom they associated, and besides the various groups of (largely Brentanist) philosophers to be found in Prague (discussed in my paper on Kafka and Brentano in this volume), such important thinkers as Stumpf, E. Hering, Mauthner, Mach and Einstein had also made a home there, as well as, somewhat later, a number of linguists around R. Jakobson (cf. Holenstein, 1976 and 1979} , and important economists such as Zuckerkandl and Englgnder. The continued fertility of the German Czech community after the fall of the Empire was undoubtedly enouraged by the liberality of Masaryk, the first president of the Republic and himself a student of Brentano and former colleague of Husserl. The latter was indeed offered a brief refuge in Prague towards the end of his life (cf. Patocka, 1976). 17. Cf. ch.l of Johnston, op.cit. lB. On the economics of human capital see e.g. the work of G. Becker and a number of the essays in Alchian 1977. 'Economics', here, should be understood in a highly general sense, embracing not only all that pertains to monetary income and capital (commercial economics), but also all forms of psychic income and capital; see McKenzie and Tullock, 197B. 19. Hayek has shown convincingly, e.g. in his 197B, that there is an important sense in which competition in the market is a knowledgediscovering process. His arguments apply no less, of course, to the market in ideas. 20. Under 'noise' we are thinking particularly of the antics of certain Freudians, and of the lesser members of the Vienna Circle, especially Neurath. 21. The opposition between 'mature' and 'immature' applied to groups of scientific workers will recall the distinction between 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science put forward by Kuhn. Unfortunately he and his followers have drawn illegitimate conclusions as to the (truth-) cont ent of theories from premisses which relate, in effect, only to their manner of production. 22. Cf. Brentano, lB95. i, ( ~, .., 2 3 2 Al c hian, A.A. (1977) Beck e r, G. (1975) Bolzano , B. (18 37) Bostaph, S. (1978) Br en tano , F. ( 18 95 ) Eng isc h, K. (1953) Ha ller , R. (1979 ) Haye k, F.A. 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