Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918, by Rudolf Kučera

Abstract

Rudolf Kučera’s 2013 Czech-language study of the fragmentation and re-constitution of the working class in the Bohemian lands in the First World War is now available in a clearly translated English-language edition, published by Berghahn Books (perhaps surprisingly, it is not part of their well-established ‘Austrian and Habsburg Studies’ series, although in approach and theme it is obviously a close cousin of many of the works featured there). Its subject is the attempt by planners to cope with wartime scarcity in Habsburg Bohemia. Something between a long essay and a monograph, it is a work of impressive intellectual sophistication and originality. Kučera’s central argument is that the First World War practically transformed into public policy long-existing scientific and rationalist discourses about the organisation of work and of workers. There seemed to exist in Habsburg war planners’ minds an ‘optimal work ratio’, the achievement of which would lead in turn to an optimal output from Czech workers, balanced, of course, against an efficient minimum of ‘inputs’. Calculations thus existed to determine the right amount of ‘fuel’ (that is, food) and work/rest balance workers would need in order to sustain themselves—oversupply in any of these fields could potentially undermine the Habsburg war economy. Kučera does not argue that there was a centralised masterplan to this process of rationalisation: this kind of power operated in a diffused, Foucaultian fashion. These were bodies of knowledge the origins of which were in the Enlightenment, but which were dormant or academic in nature until the advent of the war created an urgent need for their application in every conceivable field of the economy.