A continuing divide: Germany vs. Austria in the field of thought and politics

The contemporary world of thought has principal roots in the German-speaking world before Hitler, and these divide largely into two categories, belonging to Germany proper and the Austrian empire, which included much of what after the war became Central and Eastern Europe (including Hungary and Czechoslovakia).  This division persists, most notably in philosophy and (via economics) political thought. 

In philosophy, the dominant school in the English-speaking world is called “analytical.”  Its origins are in the English school of Russell and Moore and its adoption of Austrians Frege and Wittgenstein.  The other school, called “Continental,” is understood to be largely French.  It too is popular in America, but among scholars of literature and the arts, and those influenced by them.  It developed largely in university philosophy departments in France, and more recently also Italy.  After Bergson, a very specifically French thinker who dominated French philosophy in the 20s, French philosophy beginning around 1930 came largely under German influences, which it extended.  The principal division in the philosophical world thus today is of the heirs of Germans Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and at one time also Husserl, and Germans Frege and Wittgenstein. 

In economics and political philosophy, the Austrian Hayek is the principal influence on the neoliberalism that was introduced in the 70s by the Americans and British.  Here the division is largely of earlier origin.  France historically was, and remains comparatively, bureaucratic, with a strong central government, while England already in the 17th century was more capitalist and this also drove philosophical empiricism and political liberalism (Locke, and later Mill and others).  

In psychology, Freud’s psychoanalysis effected a demarcation from psychiatry that the Americans have more recently been busy undoing, but in its own terms it divided into two tendencies with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in England and Jacques Lacan in France.  Lacan would be taken up into Continental philosophy, a task encouraged by his own thinking, which was an eclectic borrowing from whatever he could find in contemporary ‘human sciences” including linguistics and anthropology, philosophy, and even mathematics.  Lacan is what a psychology might be if it combined surrealism (itself influenced by Breton’s and Bataille’s readings of Freud) with readings of Hegel and Heidegger.  

The English and American schools of thought may prove the stronger, as the English and French schools are bound to become integrated in various ways, and have been.  It is also the more conservative.  It continues capitalism on classical English liberal grounds.  This is the dominant ideological force in the world still.  Though it is not unchallenged.  Interestingly, most thinkers in the English schools ignore the Continentals, though, as I know from studying France, the reverse is not the case. (See my article on this site on Analytical and Continental philosophy and the differences between them.)

In America, the Continental school has flourished largely as critique.  What is criticized is several different things, from patriarchy and heteronormativity to vestiges of colonialism, however that might be thought.  That explains its influence on the art world (which is now largely defined by political thinking as critique; to see this, pick up any issue of Artforum or consider the most recent iterations, including the one just closed, of the Whitney Biennial). Professionally, philosophy proper in America continues to be wedded to science.

And our universities differ from those of France in being more tied to corporate and military research (these often go together), emphasizing technology, where America has continued to lead, while in France the university system is closely tied to primary and secondary education and an idea of the republic and its citizens that is as old as the English and America one of liberty and business.  In America we have big business and government and little ideas of liberty with much purchase on how Americans think. It still remains to be seen how, or if, the critiques of our scholars and artists will, besides fueling resentments, much change things. It may make some difference who some people read, and how. In the world of thought, the imperial Austrians would have an afterlife in post-imperial (post-colonial) Britain and America.

Curiously perhaps, the hegemony of German thought in Germany proper from 1776 (the date of publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) to 1933 continues to inspire images of thought and the political that may, paradoxically, continue to be at once more absolutist and more republican (until recently, witness the continuation of French republican thought in the Marxism of Lenin). Its principal question might well be, how can the state be an agent of liberty? This question has some interesting threads of an answer in some recent political philosophy and philosophy in other domains, including metaphysics, that have bearing on the political. They may lay partly in a more robust idea of reason and how ‘political’ social practices involving it may institute liberty in a way different from that of markets alone, were we to be stuck with the old liberty vs. the state dichotomy that was still operative in the Cold War (defining its deadlock and the ultimate end of state socialism). And that is a reason for the importance of the recent Hegel renaissance in America, as Hegel was the modern thinker after Kant and Smith (who influenced him) who took the ‘bourgeois’ idea of liberty in a different direction, which thanks to some conservative motifs in Marx that were part of the (colonialist and capitalist) developmental model of the time, blind to the ways of the political outside economics, were misread in an anti-liberal way instead of being developed more fruitfully. For we still do not know how persons might live in lives of flourishing liberty beyond the business models that have been so effective in producing wealth and in limiting the horizons or reducing the effective potentialities of untold millions of people, to opportunities to create wealth or face punitive sanctions for failure to succeed in business. For the latter, we have kinder, gentler concentration camps, scant succor for the more imaginative Berliners among us.