Johannes Feichtinger

Introduction : Particularizing Positivism

This chapter maps the fabrication and appropriation of positivism on a global scale. It particularizes and provincializes positivist universalism. Providing a comparative study of Auguste Comte’s and John Stuart Mill’s conceptions of positivism, it also shows how their disciples pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry that encompassed nature and society, a new science to enlighten mankind and ameliorate their living conditions. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Our fresh approach to global intellectual history demonstrates that positivism was no ready-made message recycled across the globe: initially grafted in response to the local problems of English and French societies, positivism was deracinated, tweaked, and adjusted while being re-elaborated by activists from Rio de Janeiro and Bengal, Istanbul and Vienna.

The Worlds of Positivism: An Analytical Synopsis

The legacies of positivism were contradictory: promising to reconcile the study of nature and culture, positivists invented natural science as a distinct field whose superiority over the humanities they asserted. Positivists devised a secular worldview but were deeply steeped in practices of spiritual regeneration, praising religion as an agent of social cohesion. Positivists sought to reconcile their universalism with the promotion of cultural diversity, but often ended up suppressing co-citizens of other languages and creeds. While Comte’s disciples demolished Western civilizational superiority and castigated imperialism, colonialism, and Christian missions, Mill’s followers often justified empire as the highroad to global representative democracy. Positivism reinvented science, basing it on observable causal regularities of similarity and succession, and it transformed politics by predicating governance on the findings this new science yielded. This chapter provides insights into all of these points.

Habsburg Positivism: The Politics of Positive Knowledge in Imperial and Post-Imperial Austria, 1804–1938

In the Habsburg lands “positive knowledge” served as the key framework of liberal science from the 1830s because it permitted its practitioners to trace ineluctable social-political progress. In the 1850s Mill’s version of positivism was translated to the Austrian lands by the classicist Theodor Gomperz. In this chapter traces the rival varieties of positivism across scientific domains (the natural sciences, philology, philosophy, history, law). It demonstrates how Mill’s model of inquiry was refashioned by Ernst Mach and Franz Brentano, by the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap, Neurath), as well as by Hans Kelsen’s critical-democratic legal positivism. The final section analyzes the fin de siecle shipwreck of positivism in conjunction with the collapse of Austrian liberalism whose vision of benign imperial rule, society, and scientific inquiry it had provided.

‘ Staatsnation ’, ‘ Kulturnation ’, ‘ Nationalstaat ’: The Role of National Politics in the Advancement of Science and Scholarship in Austria from 1848 to 1938

As Gary Cohen has written, in the Habsburg Empire national politics served ‘in fundamental ways’ as both an ‘emancipatory, centripetal process’ that ‘fuelled a popular revolt against the traditions of state absolutism’ and helped to transform the state which developed after the ‘ Ausgleich ’ or ‘Compromise’ of 1867 between Austria and Hungary, and also as a ‘destructive, centrifugal process’ 1 that eventually destroyed the Habsburg Empire, which had already been divided into halves by the recognition of Hungary as a seemingly autonomous nation-state. In Austria national politics most definitely served as a source of conflict between progressive- and conservative-minded political publics. In the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal Hungarian statesman and writer Joseph von Eotvos (1813–71) gave an idea of how national politics worked: ‘The basic principle of all national efforts is the sense of higher capability, but the intended purpose is dominance.’ 2 When viewed against the background of national power politics in the Habsburg Empire, science and scholarship became decisive factors in politics, and politics conquered the scientific and scholarly field.