The Social Democrats of Scholarship: Austrian Imperial Peripheries and the Making of a Progressive Science of Nationality, 1885–1903

Thomas Prendergast

doi:10.3390/rel6041232

Abstract

To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria’s often ethnolinguistically heterogeneous borderlands contribute to the formation, institutionalization and diffusion of emerging social scientific discourses during the final decades of the 19th century? Investigating the intellectual exchange between two early proponents of folklore studies (Volkskunde)—the Slavonian-German-Jewish Friedrich Salomon Krauss (1859–1938) and Bukovinian-German Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1866–1930)—this paper argues that imperial peripheries, while traditionally overlooked as sites of knowledge production, in fact played a pivotal role in the development of an important brand of “progressive” social scientific research, one defined by a critical stance toward the prevailing historicist paradigms of the time. These self-described “social democrats of scholarship” collaborated, both formally and informally, on a number of related theoretical projects aimed at disrupting the exclusionary narratives of the academic establishment and re-focusing scholarly attention on the sociological, rather than historical, character of ethnonational difference. In this way, the nationalities question spurred, both in the center and at the margins of the monarchy, the development of new sciences of nationality intended to sustain Austria’s imperial structure.

Highlights

To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria’s often ethnolinguistically heterogeneous borderlands contribute to the formation, institutionalization and diffusion of emerging social scientific discourses during the final decades of the 19th century? Investigating the intellectual exchange between two early proponents of folklore studies (Volkskunde)—the Slavonian-German-Jewish Friedrich Salomon Krauss (1859–1938)
Jewish folklorist several more times; in key respects, the methodology laid out in the book was heavily indebted to Krauss
Such a strange and evocative remark on the part of Krauss, and its later citation in the work of a German nationalist, raises the question: in what sense were the scholarly objectives of the nascent field of folklore (Volkskunde) understood to be analogous to the political objectives of the Social Democrats, and why did these perceived political affinities appeal to such an otherwise radically intellectually and politically dissimilar pair of thinkers?