Social Science Expertise Between the United States and Habsburg Austria

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel is devoted to contributions from institutions and individuals with origins in Austria-Hungary, to social and technical sciences in the United States. Through three case studies -- in empirical social science methodology, Habsburg historiography, and modern architecture -- the panel seeks to articulate the Central European framework for the emergence of these individuals and institutions, together with those features of their work that resonated powerfully in a North American context. Panel papers present both new archival research on widely-recognized institutional pioneers in their disciplines, such as the Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology in Vienna, including new findings on collaborative research developed by the Center, as well as less studied individual figures, such as Lois Welzenbacher, whose entry at the first exhibition of modern architecture at New York's MOMA helps to see the curatorial ambitions of exhibition organizers in unfamiliar ways. In this context, the panel also highlights the struggles of Central European experts to match their own scholarly positions and personal experiences with the expectations of an American audience. In dialogue with panel speakers, previously uncatalogued documents from Oscar Jászi indicate the role that the notable Hungarian historian played in American intellectual debates, as Jászi hoped to the cause of democracy through harmonizing the idea of “social justice” with the liberal democratic values and persisted in his search for a "Third Way” between capitalism and socialism.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Michael Burri, Haverford College

Papers

• Beyond Marienthal: Regional Social Science Partnerships and the Interwar Crisis of Liberal Democracy - Alexander Langstaff, New York U

• Aesthetic Judgment in Modernism’s Margins: The Case of Lois Welzenbacher - Sophie Higgerson, Brown U

• A Transatlantic Central European on the Third Way: Oscar Jászi and his Intellectual Impact on the New Deal Debates - Peter Csunderlik, Eötvös Loránd U / Inst of Political History (Hungary)

Discussant

• Orel Beilinson, Yale U