Thinking with History

by Carl E. Schorske

In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siécle Vienna --draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science--all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. This is in stark contrast to the historicism of the nineteenth century, he argues, when ideas about the past pervaded most fields of thought from philosophy and politics to art, music, and literature. However, Schorske also shows that the nineteenth century's attachment to thinking with history and the modernist way of thinking without history are more than just antitheses. They are different ways of trying to address the problems of modernity, to give shape and meaning to European civilization in the era of industrial capitalism and mass politics.

Schorske begins by reflecting on his own vocation as it was shaped by the historical changes he has seen sweep across political and academic culture. Then he offers a European sampler of ways in which nineteenth-century European intellectuals used conceptions of the past to address the problems of their the city as community and artifact; the function of art; social dislocation. Narrowing his focus to Fin-de-Siécle Vienna in a second group of essays, he analyzes the emergence of ahistorical modernism in that city. Against the background of Austria's persistent, conflicting Baroque and Enlightenment traditions, Schorske examines three Viennese pioneers of modernism--Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud--as they sought new orientation in their fields.

In a concluding essay, Schorske turns his attention to thinking about history. In the context of a postmodern culture, when other disciplines that had once abandoned history are discovering new uses for it, he reflects on the nature and limits of history for the study of culture.

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Carl Emil Schorske was an American cultural historian and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), which remains highly significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of the first year of MacArthur Fellows Program awards in 1981 and made an honorary cititzen of Vienna in 2012.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

For readers interested in historiography, or for Schorske completists. There is overlap here with Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The essay on Mahler was interesting reading.

[Bradford Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely book. I am ignorant of many things, but socially conditioned about them. I had previously thought that the 19th century in Europe was nothing but the century of priggish victorian sexual repression. I learned from this book that it was a little more nuanced. I certainly have no standing to judge most of what Prof. Schorske writes about. His prose styling is superb in any case.

I do have experience being excommunicated, albeit at a far lower level than persons like Sandor Ferenczi, from the Freudian Psychoanalytic Orthodoxy, and I found the part about Sigmund Freud highly intelligent. What is the value of any book? If it's not to help you pay the bills, I think it's to enrich your imaginative life so that you can have more joy in living. Schorske's description about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and the perverse and contentious Pharoah Akhnaton led me to the fantasy ("everything is grist for the mill", right?) that if Paterfamilias Sigmund Freud had had the physiological deviations of his Pharoah, esp. female-like breasts, which, in Akhnaton's case did not seem to interfere with his male fertility so he had little reason not to flaunt it --> had Siggy been so well endowed, I speculate he would probably have hid under his couch unless he could get cosmetic surgery.

I loved the book and highly recommend it.