Kulturgeschichte of a cultural and intellectual watershed, fin de siècle Vienna

Review of Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Edelston Toulmin

This is a rich intellectual history of a time when there was an explosion of new ideas in both the arts and sciences. The place was Vienna, at the end of the Habsburg monarchy, where not only Sigmund Freud (psychology) but also Loos (design), Schoenberg (music), Kochoscka (painting), and many others were establishing what we now call "modernism." It is …