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The fin de siécle legacy
Pergamon
History ofEuropeon Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 1, PP. 101-104, 1994 Copyright @ 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6989/94 $6.00+0.00
THE FIN DE SI.CLE
LEGACY
Fin de Si2cle and its Legacy, eds Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter Cambridge University Press, 1990), xii + 345 pp. H.T.
(Cambridge:
WILSON*
The text under review is a highly eclectic collection of essays on a wide range of topics connected to the fin de sikle in mainly a temporal sense. The period covered is therefore a point of reference chronologically more than constituting a cultural epitome in Western and Middle Europe between 1890 and 1914. Contributors discuss the large capitalist firm, the birth of electric power in Austria, the intervention of the car and plane, the modern Olympics, the transformation of physics, the development of neurology and genetics, and aesthetics in Germany, among other things. Closer to the standard subject matter of texts concerned with the fin de sikle are essays on the performing arts and crafts, photography, literature, painting and music, as well as on culture and the mass media and various forms of mass politics like nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism and political Catholicism. Together they provide the reader with a gestalt of the period which more than makes up for any modifications of established understandings ofjin de sitkle. While the parts are uniformly highly enlightening, the resulting whole is clearly more than and different from their sum. Adorno, whose interest in and knowledge of this period was in many respects masterful, resisted the tendency to systematise and formalise beyond the barest minimum consonant with common sense, taking seriously Nietzsche’s injunction against the recourse to system as indicative of a lack of integrity. The bare minimum necessary to hold this collection together under the fin de sikle theme, apart from temporarility, is a common belief about the impact of ‘changes in the system of capitalism, industrial and liberal, since the close of the nineteenth century.’ Virtually every essay in the collection, according to the editors, acknowledges or assumes that capitalism is the independent variable which is causally responsible for everything from changes in economic forms and new technology through the development of scientific and academic disciplines and the emergence of mass media and high culture to the modern Olympics. It is the manner in which individual contributors qualify this assertion by a careful analysis of their respective subject matters, without however fundamentally challenging the causal primacy of changes in the system of capitalism, which makes the collection quite unique by comparison to more standard treatments of thefin de sikle phenomenon. At the same time it calls to mind some important issues and concerns arising out of the limitations of this very understanding. While the remarks to follow are in no way intended to contradict the editors’ *234 McLaughlin College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J lP3. 101
102
Revieu,s
claim that the collection seeks to ‘break new ground by surveying in parallel a diversity of fields while taking into account their historical, social and geographical dimension’, they do call into question their conception of the central concerns offin de sitcle thought and culture. For the editors, and presumably contributors as well, it was the fear of the new that accounted for the all-pervasive pessimism offin de sikcle thinking. For decades fin de sikle implied a ‘go to the dogs’ feeling that was thought to pervade European ‘civilised’ society in the years around 1900. This mood of malaise certainly affected individuals and sections of aristocratic as well as bourgeois social background towards the end of the nineteenth century. Underlying it was a cocktail of lamentations for the past and fears of the future, countenancing the notion that human progress was being brought to a halt, if not to an end. This evaluation now, as we ourselves approach another turn of the century and look back, appears distinctly simplistic.
If this were indeed all there was to fin de sikle thought and concerns, I would agree wholeheartedly with the editors’ assessment. Their point, and that of their contributors, is that progress most certainly did not come either to a halt or to an end, and that therefore the pessimism and ‘mood of malaise’ responsible for creating this ‘cocktail of lamentations for the past and fears of the future’ was thoroughly wrongheaded. Many fin de sitcle thinkers and commentators, far from being worried that ‘human progress was being brought to a halt, if not to an end’ were concerned that progress itself as a technically and economically biased concept was at base opposed to culture in favour of civilisation. While there were certainly thinkers of the admittedly simplistic view that the editors report, their rendition is itself a highly simplistic understanding of the richness and complexity of the concerns of this period. In fact it was the least sophisticated amongst these thinkers and commentators who endorsed such simplistic views. Nietzsche, Kraus and Max and Alfred Weber, for example, along with numerous other artists, writers and intellectuals of the period 1890-1920 decried, often with some ambivalence to be sure, the reality of progress so defined and understood. What made the worship of progress the kind of problem it was for them was precisely the threat it posed to all forms of culture, knowledge, collectivity or rule which stood in its way. Schorske and Janik and Toulmin in particular cite this period as a ‘watershed’ in a way very different from the editors. It was characterised to a great extent by an explosion-or perhaps rather an implosion-of cultural and intellectual output of a very high quality across a wide range of intellectual, cultural, artistic, With this observation editors and scientific and professional endeavours. contributors would presumably agree. To the extent that their explanation for this-changes in the system of capitalism-is compatible with a more Marxian understanding of the significance of events, the two taken together may even bring us farther along the road to a fuller sense of the meaning of this period in recent human history. By the latter understanding I mean the claim that it is a given society’s inability to contain its structural and class-based contradictions for whatever reasons that manifests itself in such feverish activity, synergy, innovation and sheer output, not excluding preparation for ‘the war to end all wars’ and its aftermath. The later Wittgenstein might well have interpreted this
Reviews
103
activity, etc. as evidence of the fear that a form of life opposed to ‘progress’ was coming to an end, to be succeeded by one which openly embraced it, and therefore was incompatibie with its predecessor. One is not required to agree with this assessment to question the simplistic view which argues that their concerns were simplistic, however. The fact that a strong case can be made against their pessimism and anxiety does not justify simplifying their concerns and arguments. Further to the point, the evidence which contributors provide of progress in so many fields emanating precisely out of this ‘proving ground for world destruction’ and its near neighbours in no way impugns their view of both the nature of such progress and its costs. It may do just the opposite, however self-serving and/or naive we may find it. Once again, neither is any of this incompatible with the impo~ant role played by changes in the system of capitalism, though it does not by this account make the case for such an explanation unambiguously. The one point that does ring true is the sense that can be made of the period by combining these two explanations. We are then able to acknowledge the distinct likelihood that it was changes in the system of capitalism which played a significant role in generating these uncontainable structural and class-based contradictions in fin de sikle societies and cultures, without ignoring the tangential, and occasionally central, role of other factors and elements in the process. Whether we are speaking of classes (aristocracy; haute bourgeoisie), nations (France’s Second Republic, Prussia and Germany, or the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) or symbolic institutions (the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Romanov dynasties), it is this feverish activity and world-class output which simultaneously sounds the death knell of these systems and forms while announcing the birth of new ones. This is precisely what took place, with wide reaching results, some of which are chronicled and discussed in this interesting and highly eclectic collection of essays. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is both addressed and presumed by those essays which look at the mass politics and political movements leading up to and directly following World War I. For it was fascism and national socialism in a number of countries besides Italy and Germany which were the direct result of the nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism and political Catholicism of thefin de s&Me period. Far from acting as a bulwark against progress, these regimes annihilated the aristocracy and much of the haute buurge5~~jethat initially supported them and paved the way for its neartotal embrace. While these considerations do not require us to rethink the signal role of changes in the system of capitalism and their impact on technology, art, culture, science and politics during this period, they do suggest a distinct motive in focusing on economic organisation in the way the editors and contributors do which puts them at serious loggerheads with a more Marxian analysis of events. I am referring to the fact that one’s choice of independent variable or primary cause does not necessitate an endorsement of any sort of Marxian critique and may indeed imply just the opposite sentiment. Thus one can (and contributors do) acknowledge the central role of changes in the system of capitalism while being on the whole either neutral or complimentary toward what resulted from these changes. Far from being determined, if not inevitable, these changes, and the primus agens responsible for them, are variously embraced throughout the
104
Revieizts
collection, or at the very least taken for granted, as the guarantors of the very progress that the editors allegefin de&We thinkers feared was coming to a halt if not to an end. The 15 essays in this collection provide a window on the fin de si&le period which should make the collection required reading for anyone interested in the interplay of various factors, particularly economics and technology, on developments in the arts and sciences, as well as on society, culture and politics, The reader is left in no doubt about the significance of the inventions, discoveries, innovations and changes which took place during the fin de si2cle period, regardless of how they are assessed and what editors and contributors believe to be the essence of the concerns of the thinkers and commentators of this period. The essays are uniformly well written and presented and should be part of the library of anyone seriously interested in the history of late nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe. My one caveat, not surprisingly, would be that this collection should be read alongside some or all of the sources cited below by those relatively unacquainted with the literature of and on this period, given what I believe to be a significant difference in editorial point of view about the meaning of the fin de siPcle as an epitome. H.T. Wilson York University
REFERENCES Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967). Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Carl E. Schorske, Fin de SiPcle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981, 1961). Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe: the Free Press, 1949), pp. 27-38 (discussion of various meanings of ‘progress’).
History ofEuropeon Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 1, PP. 101-104, 1994 Copyright @ 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6989/94 $6.00+0.00
THE FIN DE SI.CLE
LEGACY
Fin de Si2cle and its Legacy, eds Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter Cambridge University Press, 1990), xii + 345 pp. H.T.
(Cambridge:
WILSON*
The text under review is a highly eclectic collection of essays on a wide range of topics connected to the fin de sikle in mainly a temporal sense. The period covered is therefore a point of reference chronologically more than constituting a cultural epitome in Western and Middle Europe between 1890 and 1914. Contributors discuss the large capitalist firm, the birth of electric power in Austria, the intervention of the car and plane, the modern Olympics, the transformation of physics, the development of neurology and genetics, and aesthetics in Germany, among other things. Closer to the standard subject matter of texts concerned with the fin de sikle are essays on the performing arts and crafts, photography, literature, painting and music, as well as on culture and the mass media and various forms of mass politics like nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism and political Catholicism. Together they provide the reader with a gestalt of the period which more than makes up for any modifications of established understandings ofjin de sitkle. While the parts are uniformly highly enlightening, the resulting whole is clearly more than and different from their sum. Adorno, whose interest in and knowledge of this period was in many respects masterful, resisted the tendency to systematise and formalise beyond the barest minimum consonant with common sense, taking seriously Nietzsche’s injunction against the recourse to system as indicative of a lack of integrity. The bare minimum necessary to hold this collection together under the fin de sikle theme, apart from temporarility, is a common belief about the impact of ‘changes in the system of capitalism, industrial and liberal, since the close of the nineteenth century.’ Virtually every essay in the collection, according to the editors, acknowledges or assumes that capitalism is the independent variable which is causally responsible for everything from changes in economic forms and new technology through the development of scientific and academic disciplines and the emergence of mass media and high culture to the modern Olympics. It is the manner in which individual contributors qualify this assertion by a careful analysis of their respective subject matters, without however fundamentally challenging the causal primacy of changes in the system of capitalism, which makes the collection quite unique by comparison to more standard treatments of thefin de sikle phenomenon. At the same time it calls to mind some important issues and concerns arising out of the limitations of this very understanding. While the remarks to follow are in no way intended to contradict the editors’ *234 McLaughlin College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J lP3. 101
102
Revieu,s
claim that the collection seeks to ‘break new ground by surveying in parallel a diversity of fields while taking into account their historical, social and geographical dimension’, they do call into question their conception of the central concerns offin de sitcle thought and culture. For the editors, and presumably contributors as well, it was the fear of the new that accounted for the all-pervasive pessimism offin de sikcle thinking. For decades fin de sikle implied a ‘go to the dogs’ feeling that was thought to pervade European ‘civilised’ society in the years around 1900. This mood of malaise certainly affected individuals and sections of aristocratic as well as bourgeois social background towards the end of the nineteenth century. Underlying it was a cocktail of lamentations for the past and fears of the future, countenancing the notion that human progress was being brought to a halt, if not to an end. This evaluation now, as we ourselves approach another turn of the century and look back, appears distinctly simplistic.
If this were indeed all there was to fin de sikle thought and concerns, I would agree wholeheartedly with the editors’ assessment. Their point, and that of their contributors, is that progress most certainly did not come either to a halt or to an end, and that therefore the pessimism and ‘mood of malaise’ responsible for creating this ‘cocktail of lamentations for the past and fears of the future’ was thoroughly wrongheaded. Many fin de sitcle thinkers and commentators, far from being worried that ‘human progress was being brought to a halt, if not to an end’ were concerned that progress itself as a technically and economically biased concept was at base opposed to culture in favour of civilisation. While there were certainly thinkers of the admittedly simplistic view that the editors report, their rendition is itself a highly simplistic understanding of the richness and complexity of the concerns of this period. In fact it was the least sophisticated amongst these thinkers and commentators who endorsed such simplistic views. Nietzsche, Kraus and Max and Alfred Weber, for example, along with numerous other artists, writers and intellectuals of the period 1890-1920 decried, often with some ambivalence to be sure, the reality of progress so defined and understood. What made the worship of progress the kind of problem it was for them was precisely the threat it posed to all forms of culture, knowledge, collectivity or rule which stood in its way. Schorske and Janik and Toulmin in particular cite this period as a ‘watershed’ in a way very different from the editors. It was characterised to a great extent by an explosion-or perhaps rather an implosion-of cultural and intellectual output of a very high quality across a wide range of intellectual, cultural, artistic, With this observation editors and scientific and professional endeavours. contributors would presumably agree. To the extent that their explanation for this-changes in the system of capitalism-is compatible with a more Marxian understanding of the significance of events, the two taken together may even bring us farther along the road to a fuller sense of the meaning of this period in recent human history. By the latter understanding I mean the claim that it is a given society’s inability to contain its structural and class-based contradictions for whatever reasons that manifests itself in such feverish activity, synergy, innovation and sheer output, not excluding preparation for ‘the war to end all wars’ and its aftermath. The later Wittgenstein might well have interpreted this
Reviews
103
activity, etc. as evidence of the fear that a form of life opposed to ‘progress’ was coming to an end, to be succeeded by one which openly embraced it, and therefore was incompatibie with its predecessor. One is not required to agree with this assessment to question the simplistic view which argues that their concerns were simplistic, however. The fact that a strong case can be made against their pessimism and anxiety does not justify simplifying their concerns and arguments. Further to the point, the evidence which contributors provide of progress in so many fields emanating precisely out of this ‘proving ground for world destruction’ and its near neighbours in no way impugns their view of both the nature of such progress and its costs. It may do just the opposite, however self-serving and/or naive we may find it. Once again, neither is any of this incompatible with the impo~ant role played by changes in the system of capitalism, though it does not by this account make the case for such an explanation unambiguously. The one point that does ring true is the sense that can be made of the period by combining these two explanations. We are then able to acknowledge the distinct likelihood that it was changes in the system of capitalism which played a significant role in generating these uncontainable structural and class-based contradictions in fin de sikle societies and cultures, without ignoring the tangential, and occasionally central, role of other factors and elements in the process. Whether we are speaking of classes (aristocracy; haute bourgeoisie), nations (France’s Second Republic, Prussia and Germany, or the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) or symbolic institutions (the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Romanov dynasties), it is this feverish activity and world-class output which simultaneously sounds the death knell of these systems and forms while announcing the birth of new ones. This is precisely what took place, with wide reaching results, some of which are chronicled and discussed in this interesting and highly eclectic collection of essays. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is both addressed and presumed by those essays which look at the mass politics and political movements leading up to and directly following World War I. For it was fascism and national socialism in a number of countries besides Italy and Germany which were the direct result of the nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism and political Catholicism of thefin de s&Me period. Far from acting as a bulwark against progress, these regimes annihilated the aristocracy and much of the haute buurge5~~jethat initially supported them and paved the way for its neartotal embrace. While these considerations do not require us to rethink the signal role of changes in the system of capitalism and their impact on technology, art, culture, science and politics during this period, they do suggest a distinct motive in focusing on economic organisation in the way the editors and contributors do which puts them at serious loggerheads with a more Marxian analysis of events. I am referring to the fact that one’s choice of independent variable or primary cause does not necessitate an endorsement of any sort of Marxian critique and may indeed imply just the opposite sentiment. Thus one can (and contributors do) acknowledge the central role of changes in the system of capitalism while being on the whole either neutral or complimentary toward what resulted from these changes. Far from being determined, if not inevitable, these changes, and the primus agens responsible for them, are variously embraced throughout the
104
Revieizts
collection, or at the very least taken for granted, as the guarantors of the very progress that the editors allegefin de&We thinkers feared was coming to a halt if not to an end. The 15 essays in this collection provide a window on the fin de si&le period which should make the collection required reading for anyone interested in the interplay of various factors, particularly economics and technology, on developments in the arts and sciences, as well as on society, culture and politics, The reader is left in no doubt about the significance of the inventions, discoveries, innovations and changes which took place during the fin de si2cle period, regardless of how they are assessed and what editors and contributors believe to be the essence of the concerns of the thinkers and commentators of this period. The essays are uniformly well written and presented and should be part of the library of anyone seriously interested in the history of late nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe. My one caveat, not surprisingly, would be that this collection should be read alongside some or all of the sources cited below by those relatively unacquainted with the literature of and on this period, given what I believe to be a significant difference in editorial point of view about the meaning of the fin de siPcle as an epitome. H.T. Wilson York University
REFERENCES Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967). Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Carl E. Schorske, Fin de SiPcle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981, 1961). Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe: the Free Press, 1949), pp. 27-38 (discussion of various meanings of ‘progress’).