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.
