Introduction

The Austro-Marxists, Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, and Friedrich Adler, were the second generation of the Austrian Social Democratic party, founded in 1889 by Victor Adler (Friedrich’s father) and other German-Austrian Social Democrats in an attempt to bring together the various nationalities of the Austrian Empire.¹ As a member of the Second International, the party was recognized as an orthodox organization of Marxist thought, one of the vanguard bodies in the proletarian struggle toward socialism. The Social Democratic political vision relied on Karl Marx for both intellectual and political reason. Intellectually, he brought the potential of a comprehensive system of social criticism to the effort to restructure society through his study of economics, political economy, sociology, history, and philosophy. The breadth of his thought demanded an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach among the Marxist intelligentsia to secure the facts to prove his cultural principles, and exerted a gentle pressure for cohesiveness among them. Politically, Marxism was the dominant ideology in the Second International, and because Marxist ideas provided the basis for social planning in its member parties, a Social Democrat was wedded to ideas and values considered orthodox.² Any deviation from the fundamental structure of orthodox thought was made at the risk of expulsion from the party, or at least strong public censure by party members. One of the first appearances of the Austro-Marxists in the arena of Marxist ideological controversy was Max Adler’s attack on the German Social Democrat Edvard Bernstein, as well as his own Austrian party fathers, for their questioning of the Marxist concept of class warfare.

The Austro-Marxists felt both the stimulation of Marxist interdisciplinary ideation and the pressure to conform to the orthodox concepts of Marxism more than had their party fathers, who relied on them to provide the ideas that could forge the new socialist world. The founders of the Austrian Social Democratic party were not theoreticians, though ideas were central to their values and vision of society. They were, rather, astute political organizers, whose energies were consumed in the creation of a coherent political party with a membership worthy of a national party.³ They bequeathed the herculean task of interpreting everyday reality in a Marxist mode to their progeny (Nachwuchs).

Devoting a lifetime to this task, the Austro-Marxists furthered thinking in every realm of individual and social life, from theories of knowledge and personal identity to interpretations and constructs of political, legal, and social reality. The breadth of their vision was prompted not only by the ambitious character of Marxism; additionally, the intellectual ferment of the Austrian Empire in the decades before World War I demanded that anyone who dared to present views of life and society have a familiarity with the most significant thought in every domain of knowledge. The intellectuals who developed new ideas and established movements of thought in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences in the quarter century before World War I were legion in Vienna. The competition to excel intellectually was felt by Viennese youth even while they were secondary students, and every youth who aspired to high culture had not only to become an encyclopedist in a particular subject but to contribute new syntheses of existing ideas, if not original thought.⁴

The stimulation and constraint placed on the Austro-Marxists by the orthodoxies and norms of Marxism, Austrian Social Democracy, and the Austrian intelligentsia created a pressure to bring ideas to public attention before they were fully developed. Undeveloped ideas were liable to withering criticism or stultifying adulation; contemporaries of the Austro-Marxists, such as Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka, and later Ludwig Wittgenstein, chose relative seclusion and noncommunication for long periods of their lives so their ideas could mature. The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt was said to have lost his creative spirit when he had to face the public clamor that surrounded his work, so vocal and incessant was public discussion of a creative person’s vision.⁵ A political personality, however, does not have the luxury of withdrawal from the public. The Austro-Marxists found immediate status and prominence in the political-intellectual world by publishing in the socialist organs of their day, but the easy access and waiting readership interfered with the thoroughness, clarity, and logic of each man’s ideation. Thought for them became increasingly eclectic over their careers and less and less based on facts. There was a positive side to their reaction to the public readiness for their work: they understood the need to be current and literate in discussion and were aware of their roles as social educators. They took care to offer cogent reviews of contemporary social thinkers who were close to or in conflict with their thought, and they presented their ideas with a historical depth that enabled a reader to comprehend the background and continuity of social problems.

The problems the Austro-Marxists addressed still exist in culture: ethnicity and integration, the integrity of the individual within a cohesive or noncohesive community, the means and methods of achieving equity within the social-economic order, and the many epistemological, axiological, and social scientific issues associated with improving the quality of life. Their consideration of these problems was seminal. Even today the directions of their thought are promising, but their thought was never fully developed either in words or actions. Instead, they used ideas prematurely as vehicles for social mobility, helping them gain recognition and security in their environment, distorting the thought into a metaphorical expression that served many purposes. A study of the individual Austro-Marxist in his milieu will enable us to see the difficulties that have always faced an individual who strives to improve his culture from a theoretical perspective. The mixing of personal needs with public actions, an almost inescapable consequence of public life, creates a strain on scientific inquiry and expression. Facts are selected and shaped to serve personal preference, and preference is a condition of both conscious and unconscious needs. The result is a politics of metaphor which is clear to neither the agent nor his audience and in which what is stated is incongruent with what is done, for how can one possibly act congruently with a metaphor? Can a political thinker ever formulate unambiguous solutions so that both he and his constituents can implement an idea and evaluate its consequences? Probably not, but there is a continuum of conscious responsibility in statement and act which may distinguish a politics of semantic and behavioral integrity from a politics of metaphor. Normally, the literal meaning of ideas guides a society in the establishment of norms for everyday reality and in the maintenance of social institutions. Even when the literal meaning is diluted or strengthened by poetic allusion, or deformed by the language evasions that Sigmund Freud saw so well both in medical practice and on the streets of Vienna, the life of the body politic is governed by the implicit semantic definiteness upon which the less definite statement arose. Society is an achievement of common understanding among people. Semantic definiteness is a necessity in order to achieve the division of labor and the duration of activities that enable a people’s survival and creation of a mutually satisfactory pattern of life.

Society can continue to exist, and in a healthy, even improved manner, within a politics of metaphor, if that metaphor of word and action is used judiciously. A conscious application of the politics of metaphor can create images for oneself and others that bring new insight into the implications of a particular condition and into the possible approach for solving a problem. One is anchored by the literal meaning that is the basis of any metaphorical expression, and one may keep an eye on literal reality while entertaining the figurative possibility. Colin Murray Turbayne, in The Myth of Metaphor, a work fundamental to my understanding and use of the term in the study of the Austro-Marxists, explores how a thinker juxtaposes formerly diverse literal meanings to create a suggestive image or assertion, the metaphor, to help himself and others begin to dwell upon something that calls for a fresh understanding. One knows that the metaphor is not a reality; rather, each literal semantic thread borrowed to create the image may help one use the image of the metaphor as an intersection that exposes new avenues for research.⁶ But the thinker and his audience may forget that what he has used for insight is not real and begin to hold that “man is a wolf” or that “the economy is out of control.” This second use of metaphor, an abuse, is seductive to both the thinker and the audience, for it evokes the emotion of the thing’s possible significance, while convincing those who entertain it that they have defined what they still must study empirically and logically. A third use of metaphor, a more pronounced abuse, is when one begins to formulate laws based on the image, so that “man is a wolf” or “the economy is out of control” becomes the basis of a series of deductive principles and thus a quasi-science or politics of metaphor that is sterile.⁷

When a society furthers a politics or science that relies on principles that cannot be demonstrated for they are grounded upon metaphor, not concept, its reasoning may be called flight from reality. The flight can be from unacceptable social facts or from instinctual life that is too demanding for realization. The practitioners of metaphor who become enchanted by the seeming validity of their insight, as well as the audience who accepts their premises, know in the depths of their consciousness that these so-called objective statements are bearers of multiple meaning which are artfully constructed to hide the painful reality from their sight, just as a neurotic creates symptoms to hide from himself and gain an advantage in the environment that health could not achieve.⁸ The flight from objective facts of the environment is often easier to recognize in society than a flight from instinct.⁹ The stereotyping of members from other socioeconomic classes and the institutional attempts to deny the presence of people and conditions that cannot be faced leave imprints that are more readily recognizable than the symbolic distortions of the instinctual realm. This study of the Austro-Marxists will reflect upon forms of defense against both the realities of instinct and the environment but will highlight patterns of thought and action that are called “denial.”¹⁰ Denial enables its practitioner to ignore selectively the facts of a particular external situation while accommodating reality in other areas; with the cooperation of associates, one can practice denial in certain areas and respond to reality in most other dimensions of one’s life. When a broadly shared cultural pattern distorts instinctual or external reality, ideas that relate to that reality will be truncated so as to probe no more deeply than understanding can comfortably sustain. In such a society ideas that touch upon painful areas will be seen to serve limited functions, and the failure to present an adequate grounding of thought in factual demonstration, or to act in correspondence with the ostensible literal meaning of one’s words, will be tacitly accepted. Every society is prone to some avoidance of reality given its inherited social and economic structures.¹¹

The meaning systems of denial which the Austro-Marxists shared with other members of their political party belied the social democratic principles inherent to the Marxist perspective. Instead of a democratic structuring of their own political party, with two-way communication and democratic participation facilitated among all members, the Austrian Social Democratic leadership emulated the political structure of the nondemocratic Habsburg dynastic state. Instead of establishing the community of work as the social basis for equality and equity within the party as a model of their future aspirations, they created an elite group of oligarchs based upon level of education and personal favor. Instead of a cultural program for Austria that respected the rights of every citizen based solely upon his dignity as an individual, they promulgated one’s rights as a member of a nation; therefore, rather than supporting the rights of every national within Austria, they promoted a chauvinistic nationalism that insisted that among the nine nationalities of Austria, only the German culture had civilized value. The Austro-Marxists and their fellow party members had other ideas that can be construed as evidence of denial. Their hesitation to assert socialist principles when in positions of power or to support workers in assertive action against the government reflected a temporizing character that was often justified by metaphorical “theory.” Their inability to make timely decisions and their passivity in the midst of social crisis can be seen as symptoms of their inability to assimilate social facts into their publicly stated mission.

These obvious disjunctions between the Marxist principles of their inherited vision and the words and acts that frustrated the development of a truly social democratic party (and, when they assumed political power after World War I, frustrated the development of a social democratic state) were normative patterns that had their origin in the middle-class milieu of German Austria. These normative behaviors protected a way of life in a state that favored Germans, but at the price of full political and social control over one’s life, even as a German. These norms are well drawn in the cultural histories of Austria by Carl Schorske, William M. Johnston, and Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. A study of these norms of denial as they appeared in the political personalities of the Austro-Marxists may be called a microsociology of the men, in the sense used by Johnston in The Austrian Mind. Johnston states that a microsociology of thinkers examines how certain ideas and attitudes were formed in them by their social milieu as they grew from childhood into adulthood. It is a “micro” sociological study in that it shows the group norms as they appear in an individual’s thought and action; a “macro” study would consider the formal and informal social institutions that formed the individual patterns. The presence of shared social patterns of idea, attitude, and behavior in an individual is governed by that person’s intellect and emotional maturity; a person can change himself to correct inherited norms, even when they are strongly reinforced by his society. Johnston calls certain thinkers engagé intellectuals when they seek to change the norms of their milieu.¹² Any change in the norms of a culture requires an equivalent change in oneself before one can change others. It may be impossible to change totally an inherited normative pattern, but one may modify one’s ideas and actions if they seem clearly harmful or grossly belie one’s more idealistic notions. The process of such a change is not easy, and it involves a consciousness of self that men such as Sigmund Freud won very painfully. Freud’s gift to the culture is a study of how the human mind creates defenses against social and personal facts that it cannot accept and how one can modify those defensive structures of thought and behavior, enabling more accurate thought and more congruent action and as a consequence a life free of mental illnesses.

I will use Freud’s concept of ego defense, with its several modes of deformation of idea and action,¹³ to make clear how the norms of thought and behavior of the Austro-Marxist political personalities were formed and how they were used to protect the individual egos of the men in their public lives. Identification of the social norms influencing the individuals will be the microsociological aspect of the study, while the formation and use of these norms will be viewed from a psychodynamic perspective, with the help of Freud’s psychology and that of Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler, who accepted and employed Freud’s concept of ego defense while bringing broader explanatory causes to individual motivation than Freud’s etiology.

The Austro-Marxist politics of metaphor contains a shared cultural level and a personal level that reflects individual family experience, as well as the unique depths of individual character. The personal level cannot be seen in a political personality as clearly as can the cultural level. The biological and psychic inheritance that formed personalities apart from the cultural conditioning of public life may be inferred in the thought and actions of the political personality but are not as prominent in their appearance as are cultural norms. Nevertheless, the psychobiographer can see characteristic expressions and actions over the life of a thinker that cannot be fully explained as cultural norms and may be associated with family or personal origins. Such personal signs within the thought and behavior of a political personality are not an indication of mental imbalance, as Peter Gay’s study of the relationship between ideational style and personal temperament in noted historians demonstrates.¹⁴ Although the neurotic political personality leaves signs of the personal levels of causation in all his public actions, a highly personal style should not be considered a sign of abnormality. The Austro-Marxists displayed distinct temperaments that influenced their political lives; if we are to understand the men fully, we must recognize that their psychobiological inheritance influenced their life choices in a manner that can be distinguished from their defensive personal or cultural motives. Jung’s conception of psychological types, wherein an inherent temperament inclines one toward a particular mode of response to experience, may help us to see a healthier side of the men’s decisions.¹⁵

The Austro-Marxists were physically and mentally capable individuals; the ego defense they displayed is an inevitable individual and group phenomenon in a culture, and one must consider a range of defensiveness when deciding whether such defenses are unhealthy yet normal or extreme enough to produce a neurosis or psychosis.¹⁶ The culture of Austria, particularly among the German-Austrian intelligentsia, had norms that must be classified as unhealthy and creating preconditions for individual neurosis. Nevertheless, this same cultural community had beneficial norms, especially its dedication to the arts and the sciences and its demand on individuals for breadth of knowledge and participation in discussion. On the whole, Austrian culture must be seen as normal, having produced men and women whose contributions in the arts and sciences still nourish civilization.

Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler were extremely neurotic at various times in their lives, and their personal problems dominate even the cultural forms of ego defensiveness in their writings and actions during these periods; however, both men contributed to their culture, stimulating others with their thought and action. In studying the ideas of the Austro-Marxists, I will dissect the sound kernel of thought which continues to nourish from the weakness in denotative clarity, the metaphorical intrusion, and the incomplete ideation and political act, which typified the dross of a cultural attempt to avoid encountering seemingly insoluble social realities. The value of the seminal ideas will be considered as they responded to Austrian political and social conditions, as well as in their continuing value for political and social analysis. The distortions in ideas will be demonstrated as syndromes of political activity that must be recognized in any society if one is to understand the reasons for the disjunctions between word and deed which cripple responsible social action.

Table 1. Cultural Dominance

Source: Jaszi, Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 278.

The cultural inheritance of the Austro-Marxists, especially the norms of the German-Austrian intelligentsia and the Austrian Social Democratic party, must be examined if we are to appreciate the appearance of these norms in the words and actions of the men.

Austria was ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph of the Habsburg family from 1848 until 1916. Like his predecessors, he supported the hegemony of German culture in the multinational state. The Austrian Empire consisted of seventeen “crown lands,”¹⁷ which were populated by nine nationalities. Cultural dominance (Table 1) and government power (Table 2) were in the hands of the German nationality, although it comprised only 35.6 percent of the Austrian population, according to the 1900 census.¹⁸

Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire, was a cosmopolitan city with ethnic diversity, but its majority population was German. The German intelligentsia centered in Vienna; the weight of their cultural influence far exceeded their numbers, partly because German was the dominant cultural language and the language of the government.

The intelligentsia of Austria made up only about 1 percent of the population. Perhaps the foremost common characteristic of the intelligentsia was reverence for the written word, the dominant means of communication and self-assertion in the Vienna of the Habsburg Monarchy. As Stefan Zweig emphasized in his book of reflective judgment upon the two decades before 1914, “The word still had power. It had not yet been done to death by the organization of lies, by ‘propaganda,’ and people still considered the written word, they looked to it.” The gift of language and the preoccupation with that gift came early to the youth of Vienna. Zweig, recalling his intellectual awakening at the age of sixteen, comments: “We [secondary school intellectuals] were masters of all the tricks, the extravagances, the venturesomeness of the language, we possessed the technique of every verse form, and in countless attempts had tested every style from Pindaric pathos to the simple diction of the folksong. Each day we showed each other our work, mutually pointed out the slightest discrepancies, and discussed every metric detail.”¹⁹

Table 2. Government Power

Source: Jaszi, Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 278.

One gained identity with his fellows through the written word, and thus the competition to be read led the intellectual to attempt very early the development of a Weltanschauung. If he had an organized set of opinions concerning life, the young intellectual might be recognized by his contemporaries and even followed by disciples of his thought. Dangers in the demand for an articulate world view early in one’s life were the eclecticism that confused experience with the parroting of adopted ideas and the chance that dependency on one’s mediated view of the world could restrict one’s vision of life’s immediate possibilities. Hermann Bahr, the dean of the pre-1914 Viennese intelligentsia, bemoaned the universal literacy of the time, with its tendency not only to prodigy but to prodigious glibness: “There are no bad books anymore. Every educated person looks around him carefully, has thoughts about what he sees, and knows how to render what he has seen or experienced in a proper literary style, indeed, often in a masterful fashion.”²⁰

The number of newspapers and journals published in Vienna between 1890 and 1914 gives meaning to the words of Zweig and Bahr. The city’s population in 1890 was approximately one million. That year 863 different newspapers and periodicals were published, 622 of them in the German language. By 1914, the population of Vienna had increased to approximately two million people, and the volume of publications had increased accordingly: there were 1,535 newspapers and periodicals, of which 1,475 were in the German language.²¹

The ideas offered by this vast literary production seem to have been as abundant as their vehicles, for periodicals tended to be read only by those who adopted their notions, and their life spans approximated the duration of their ideological popularity.²² No matter what side of a polemic one might be on, however, or what philosophy of existence one might advocate, all expressions were born of the same conceptual heritage—a century of German philosophical idealism. The written word had a cultural history that inevitably placed it in a universe with identifiable limitations. The problematics of the literary German mind traveled within the boundaries instilled by a systematic education that was known by the expression Bildung.

Bildung has, as its root, a combination of “image” (bild) and “to form or constitute” (bilden). Thus Bildung proved to be a pattern of courses from elementary to graduate school (the university) in which very specific images of reality were developed in the mind of the individual.²³ The world of the individual who passed through this Bildung tended to depend forever upon the patriarchal images and the few men who had fathered them.²⁴

Karl Renner, writing a tribute to one of the founders of Austrian Social Democracy manifested the importance of the German cultural tradition to the Social Democratic intelligentsia: “For Pernerstorfer the task of socialism existed above all in making the advanced culture and civilization created by the German intellectual heroes accessible to the people. For him, socialism was the inheritance of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Fichte, Beethoven and Wagner, an inheritance which at the time was monopolized by a small elite whose sacred and national duty lay in making this knowledge available to the masses.”²⁵

But Pernerstorfer and Victor Adler, founders of Austrian Social Democracy, assumed the role of a new elite. They considered themselves vanguards of a new social order that would be the culmination of the German inheritance. Moreover, all of Austria, Germans and non-Germans alike, would inherit the fruit of their labors.

The Austrian Social Democratic party was born of a newspaper. The editorial opinions of Die Gleichheit, under the guidance of Victor Adler from 1886 to 1889, established the program Austrian socialists adopted at Hainfeld in 1889, when they gathered to found a unified political party to carry on the “class struggle” in Austria.²⁶ But Die Gleichheit was only one of many newspapers that represented views of socialism. The other socialistic papers remained in operation after Hainfeld and conducted a literary war with the newly formed Austrian Social Democratic party, which was controlled by Victor Adler and the policies expressed through Die Gleichheit.²⁷ From 1889 until 1892 the editorial board of Die Gleichheit (the name was changed in June 1889 to Arbeiter-Zeitung) made all decisions about the actions of the new party.²⁸ Adler’s editorials were the marching orders for all those who considered themselves Austrian Social Democrats, the yearly meeting of Austrian Social Democracy (the Parteitag) being merely a rubber stamp for the daily policy made by the newspaper.²⁹

Table 3. Occupations of the Viennese Membership of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 1914

Source: Robert Danneberg, “Ein Blick ins Innere der Wiener Arbeiterkewegung,” Der Kampf 7 (June 1914): 396.

The Austrian Social Democratic intellectual of Vienna, when included within the sphere of decision making by Victor Adler, became an oligarch.³⁰ The number of intelligentsia in the party was small (see Table 3), but because Victor Adler had organized the party structure like that of an army (see Figure 1), their decisions created and controlled all party policy at all levels.³¹

The party chain of command, as the figure shows, emanated from the Executive Committee, a body permanently located in Vienna that ranged from twelve to twenty members over the period 1892 to 1918. All daily political action was controlled by the Executive Committee, which thereby effectively determined the interpretation of the party program. The Executive Committee was elected at the annual or biannual meeting of the representatives from the various nations of Austria (Gesamtparteitag), but this election, which was purportedly to permit the masses to pick their own leaders and choose their own policy, was only nominally democratic. Of the approximately 300 party members who were entitled to attend the party conference, only about 170 were elected delegates, and all came from the higher levels of the organization (two for each Bezirk, Kreis, and Land). The remaining 130 places at the party conference were assigned on an oligarchic basis. The Haus, Strasse, and Lokal, the grassroots level of membership, had no direct access to participation in party policy. The entire Executive Committee, Secretariat, and the club of Social Democratic representatives in Parliament were automatically entitled to attend, as were the heads of all trade unions. The party conference was, then, an assembly of disciplined career Social Democrats, all of whom were highly placed. The highest among the real leaders of the party were consequently able to persuade the conference to adopt their policies with monotonous regularity, especially since the proceedings were always conducted by the members of the Executive Committee.³²

The Hierarchical Organization of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (German Austrian Social Democracy, after 1911)

Source: Parteitag, 1913. See also Clifton Gene Follis, “The Austrian Social Democratic Party, June 1914–November 1918” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford Univ., 1961), p. 16. Follis does not depict the line of authoritative command emanating from the party oligarchy.

Theoretically, a party member might take issue with the leaders at any time, but conflict might occur only within the walls of the party, not in public. All physical manifestations of belief contemplated by a party member had to be approved by party headquarters. The Austro-German Social Democrats of Vienna, the leaders of the party between 1889 and 1934, could justify their military chain of command by reminding their critics of the class warfare in which they were engaged. As Victor Adler told the anarchistically inclined radicals of the party: “Yet a word to these comrades who fear ‘centralization’. . . . A party that would bring about Social Democracy must be structured in a manner that is well ordered and in its turn capable of ordering. The organized party structure of our opponents is the chief factor of their power; if we wish to be victorious, we must not condemn ourselves to impotency with a childish fear of ‘party tyranny.’”³³

An Austrian Social Democratic state that resembled Austria was gradually developed; it was necessary to obey the party’s legal, executive, and administrative institutions if one were to remain a citizen. The Austro-Marxists were inevitably molded by this state within a state. A steady diet of polemics, once removed from any possibility of political actualization, poorly prepared them for the world of action outside their small arena.

The intellectual’s alienated position in Austria, particularly aggravated by the universal views engendered by his education, was not overcome within the workers’ party. Rather, Austrian Social Democracy provided him with an audience that ineluctably fed his ego while maintaining his isolation from the working class. Franz Blei reflected that in the early days of Austrian Social Democracy, Victor Adler was called “the Doctor,” reflecting the inclination by most workers to pay a class respect to the “educated.” He remarked that this embarassed the Austrian Socialist intellectuals, but seemed an inescapable role in the interaction.³⁴

The Austro-Marxists, on the other hand, achieved the power and position they enjoyed in the Austrian Social Democratic hierarchy because of their insensitivity to the dilemma indicated by Blei. For them, being a vanguard of the proletariat was not an embarrassment, nor did it appear to be a metaphor. They had reified their positions as beacons to the masses sufficiently in their understanding and their everyday actions so that they could be used by the metaphor with an equanimity that enabled them to justify actions in the name of the proletariat that assured their leadership positions in the party.

The Austro-Marxist sense of leadership and mission was expressed in the first Austrian Social Democratic platform at Hainfeld in 1889, which they inherited: “The Austrian Social Democratic party, working for the whole people [Das Volk] without distinction of nation, race, or sex, strives to free the people from intellectual atrophy . . . to organize the proletariat politically, and to fill them with a consciousness of their position and their task, to make them ready physically and mentally for battle and to maintain this readiness.”³⁵

The habits of their intellectual background inevitably transformed revolutionary ideals into thought tailored to the regularity of their lives as Austrian citizens of the middle class. As a young student, Max Adler, in distinguishing between the “true proletariat” and the “student proletariat” (as unemployed bourgeois students often chose to depict themselves) drew a picture unwittingly of himself and his future Austro-Marxist associates as well as of virtually every other Austrian Social Democratic intellectual: “The chief characteristic of the proletariat . . . is their constancy and dependency (as a class subjected by capital). This is not the condition, however, of the student proletariat, whose goal, rather, is to work themselves out of their difficulties into a good bourgeois position. . . . Thus, the greatest betrayal of youthful ideals is to be found with students. This feeling of belonging to the bourgeois class, if only reflected in the hope of eventually bettering one’s position, separates the intellectual proletariat from the industrial proletariat.”³⁶

The Austro-Marxists were chosen as leaders by their cultural fathers and their peers because of their weaknesses as well as strengths. They were able to articulate the issues of everyday life and monumental history in terms of Marxist thought, clarifying and giving direction to events according to an inherited paradigm. They were also chosen as leaders because they typified certain blindness and incongruencies in their thought and action. In external politics, their thought stopped safely within the parameters that preserved existing norms of policy and action. In political practice within the party, they maintained the norms that denied participatory democracy to the rank-and-file members. Contemporary research in group dynamics confirms that leaders will express the expectational norms of their group if they are to be esteemed as leaders.³⁷ To break the circular pattern of such behavior, the Austro-Marxists would have to experience the support of a democratic state and democratic norms of social interaction. As Immanuel Kant perceptively saw of his fellow Germans in 1793, one had to practice democracy in order to be adept at it: “We cannot ripen to this freedom if we are not first of all placed therein (we must be free in order to be able to make purposive use of our powers in freedom). The first attempts will indeed be crude and usually will be attended by a more painful and more dangerous state than that in which we are still under the orders and also the care of others; yet we can never ripen with respect to reason except through our own efforts (which we can make only when we are free).”³⁸

When World War I ended, the Austro-Marxists had their opportunity for democratic socialism, and, as Kant had predicted, their first attempts were less than successful because of their inexperience in the practice of freedom, either toward others or within themselves.