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  • Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life
  • Robert M. Brain
Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life. By Deborah R. Coen (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007) 380 pp. $45.00

Within the lively historiography of Central European liberalism and its alleged deviance from broader international patterns, the story of Austrian liberalism has usually been sung in an especially tragic key. The most influential version has been that of Schorske, who argued that Austrian liberalism arose as a manifestation of public reason only to implode a generation later with the bourgeoisie's fiight into skepticism and the cultivation of the intimate sphere.1 Schorske's account of liberalism hinged on a specific conception of rationality, in which uncertainty and doubt were held at bay, and the private sphere hovered as a perilous challenge. Coen's outstanding book shows a much different notion of rationality at play in the heart of Austrian liberalism, thereby mounting a fundamental challenge to the entire Schorskean vision of Austrian liberalism's fate.

Coen's story revolves around the Exner family, the great scientific dynasty, which from the 1840s to World War I shaped the educational system of the Habsburg Empire through service as advisers to the education Ministry and the Upper House of Parliament and as university professors and administrators. The Exners produced ten professors in Austrian universities, nearly all of whom made important contributions in physics, physiology, law, and medicine (including one Nobel Prize winner, the insect biologist Karl Frisch, an Exner on his mother's side). As teachers, colleagues, or intimate friends of a great many Austrian scientists and thinkers, the Exners' point of view left its mark on many notable works of fin de siècle science and culture. Students included Erwin Schroedinger and Sigmund Freud; colleagues included Ludwig Boltzman [End Page 103] and Ernst Mach; close friends included Joseph Breuer and Marie Ebner von Eschenbach.

To posit the existence of an "Exner point of view" might wrinkle an eyebrow, but Coen convincingly shows the remarkable coherence of what contemporaries dubbed Exnerei. She examines how the Exners carefully constructed a new kind of moral authority on their personal capacities to confront and manage uncertainty in a world where religion no longer guaranteed truth. The Exner saga began with family patriarch Franz Exner, a professor of philosophy and principal architect of the curriculum reforms in the Austrian Gymnasium after 1848. Exner insisted that it was possible to teach students to be free autonomous citizens through mastery of the faculty of attention and new forms of probabilistic reason to avoid error and tame uncertainty in judgment.

At the heart of his conception was a campaign against determinist causality, viewed as a holdover from a clerical and aristocratic authoritarian age, which Franz Exner dubbed the "pigtail of the 19th century" (in analogy to the pigtail that some Austrian aristocrats still wore.).

Unlike those who simply imagined a liberal state built by citizens trained in the humanistic Gymnasium, the Exners believed that public education could not succeed without a foundation in family life. The Exners' own family life revolved around their summer retreat at Brunnwinkl, in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, where they built an emblematic liberal learning environment in which the virtues of freedom and contingency were celebrated in readings, lectures, and discussions for relatives, friends, colleagues, and students.

Coen weaves a graceful and brilliant narrative that moves back and forth between the Exner's family life in Brunnwinkl and their ambitious public endeavors in Viennese science and politics.

Coen portrays the Exner outlook as a highly optimistic and forward looking approach to the world. Yet by the late nineteenth-century, the Exners became repeatedly embroiled in political, ideological, and philosophical struggles against socialists, pan-German nationalists, and Christian Socials. Although each of these opponents demanded different kinds of response, Coen demonstrates a common thread in the Exners' constant insistence on freedom as an embrace of contingency and rejection of dogmatism, with probability as the methodological expression of that freedom. When the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald argued that the curriculum of Austrian gymnasia eroded the Kausalitätsempfindung (causal sense) of young people, a committee...

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