"Viennese ideas saturate the modern world, from California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, populist politics to green economics. Almost every aspect of our history, science and culture--including gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission and fitted kitchens--every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. The city of Freud, of Wittgenstein, of Mahler, and of Hitler was the melting pot at the heart of a metropolitan empire. But with the rise of fascism and the Second World War, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home were scattered across the world, where their ideas would have profound impact. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna's rich intellectual history, from psychoanalysis to infographics, Cockett takes us from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal thinkers of the Austrian School aho informed Reaganomics.. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world--and how we all became inescapably Viennese." -- inside front jacket flap.
|