Beyond Marienthal: Regional Social Science Partnerships and the Interwar Crisis of Liberal Democracy

• In Event: Social Science Expertise Between the United States and Habsburg Austria

Abstract

Anchored at the famous Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology in Vienna, the “grandmother of all social research bureaus”, this network was a hotbed of experimentation and fission between American and variegated European social science traditions. It facilitated several ambitious commercial and academic research projects that sought to address the collapse of confidence in liberal visions of the consumer and citizen, and led to revolutionary empirical survey techniques. This paper pieces together the Austrian Centre’s collaborations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary for the first time.

Author

• Alexander Langstaff, New York U