I
We all know that our actual life is more or less a deformation of our potential life . . . the task is for one to test his actual life within his given situation against what his life could be. As a biographer, this allows us to test the degree of integrity the actual life has.
—José Ortega y Gasset
1
The Austro-Marxists did not represent a “school of thought.”1 They were separate thinkers who shared membership in the Social Democratic party but were a generation younger than its founders, lived in or were closely associated with life in Vienna in the quarter century before World War I, and contributed significant theoretical and practical analyses of the many social issues that concerned the party.2 Although each man adhered to such Marxist concepts as the dialectic in history, class conflict, and the alienation of the worker from the value of his labor, each based his thinking on different philosophical positions, and so treated these concepts in different ways.
Even when the Austro-Marxists seemed to share common ideas, as when Otto Bauer used Karl Renner’s notion of “personality” as a basis for national identity, Bauer’s transformation of the concept created a distance between the men. Renner was essentially a man of “common sense” for whom materialism was self-evident. He preferred John Stuart Mill to Hegel, so although he saw the importance of ideas in influencing history, he approached social reality as a reformist within a stable world; he did not see the world as a place of dialectical change based upon laws of social transformation. Bauer, on the other hand, saw in every living thing and social institution a competitive striving for survival; his thought was close to Social Darwinism, and he preferred Marxism, perhaps because of the class struggle and the human values associated with it. Bauer believed that the dialectic in history was a law that had its own reality in the material world and was not dependent upon the translation of this reality in human consciousness; the numbers that made up each social class, and their relative strength within the social fabric, determined the movement of history. His quantitative view of how classes transformed history, though never clearly drawn, indirectly reflected his understanding of biological competition and natural selection.
Max Adler was a neo-Kantian, who brought his analysis of human consciousness to every historical event or social issue. Among the Austro-Marxists, he came perhaps the nearest to Marx’s Hegelian notion of a dialectic movement of events based upon human motivation and thought, guided by social structures created by certain orientations of human idea and value. Renner’s study of legal norms in various periods of Western culture could have helped Adler for it demonstrated the interaction between social conditions, laws based upon these conditions, and human values, as well as the change in these relationships over time. Renner, however, saw these interactions and changes from a Lockean viewpoint, in which a gradual emendation and accretion of ideas could transform society, not as the result of a radical altering of consciousness and social structures to correspond more truly to the social being of individuals, as Max Adler’s amalgam of Kant and Marx implied.
Otto Bauer was attracted to the radical implications of Adler’s neo-Kantian Marxism as a young man but rejected it as a “metaphysical” diversion, favoring a natural law of the environment over one of the mind. Friedrich Adler shared Max Adler’s certainty that an interaction of human consciousness and the material world created a dynamic, which was the foundation for individual and group movement in history. Friedrich Adler, however, studied the mind as an adherent of the physicist-epistemologist Ernst Mach, who denied that the Kantian a priori categories of consciousness existed and for whom absolute laws in thinking, science, or social planning were anathema. Mach’s relativism was based on his view that because material being created and conditioned consciousness, every new historical ordering of environment and society required new measures and values to enable the human society to correspond and to cope with what existed. The relativism had radical implications, for society could be transformed every generation if the changes met reality. The material determinism of Mach’s view was also attractive to Friedrich Adler because it enabled dialectical materialism to find justification in the natural sciences. Neither Renner, Bauer, nor Max Adler could accept the denial of enduring measures or laws of human and societal development.
There was a second major reason why the Austro-Marxists did not represent a school of thought besides their diverse orientations to Marx, nature, and culture. An authentic school of thought shares a body of clearly defined concepts, which it applies as interpretive and explanatory mechanisms in treating the realities with which it deals. A school of thought is a body of ideas that can be a medium and a guide for later thinkers and remains valid over time. The ideas of the Austro-Marxists, with a few exceptions such as Renner’s study of legal norms, were time-bound because they stopped short of the thorough, empirical grounding that would have clarified their operational definition and allowed their testing in experience to demonstrate their validity and reliability. Nevertheless, the ideas of the Austro-Marxists stimulated even when they failed to solve; and although the pressures of these men’s milieu and personality needs curtailed the clarification necessary to make their ideas survive over generations, they still can be applied to present problems.
Intellectuals in contemporary Europe have looked to the Austro-Marxists for insight into theoretical and practical questions of integrating socialism and democracy. Young socialists and Eurocommunists such as Detlev Albers, Josef Hindels, and Lucio Radice, are attracted especially to Otto Bauer’s thought.3 Among the ideas considered relevant for contemporary concerns are Bauer’s post–World War I views that social revolution should be stimulated among the working classes in all countries and that workers should be aided in cooperation across national boundaries, whether the nations are communist, socialist, or capitalist.4 We will see that this notion was rooted in Bauer’s prewar view of the fundamental, evolutionary nature of the class struggle. Only a socialist who experienced the multinational issues of Austria before World War I could appreciate the need for a broader base of cooperation than nation and could perhaps intuit an avenue of solution. Other contemporaries have turned to Max Adler as a source for the critical study of consciousness that may shed light upon the forms social institutions assume or might assume given the nature of social intelligence.5 The Eurocommunists and social democrats of modern Europe have found a rich source among the Austro-Marxists for approaching the problems of unifying the European community in a social democratic polity, but much original thinking is necessary to complete the Austro-Marxist perspectives.
The appearance of unity among the Austro-Marxists, noted by historians such as Raimund Loew, was created by their common concerns, which bridged philosophical differences, enabling them to cooperate in practical projects for common ends. They were members of a political party that had an articulated mission of social change—the creation of a socialized, democratic state. As such, they considered themselves intellectual leaders with the common responsibility to be “vanguards of the proletariat,” educating the masses in the scientific criticism that would enable them to accept the Marxist view and prepare them to participate in the tasks of social change. The Austro-Marxists collaborated in developing educational programs for workers and students, though a close look at the curriculum and pedagogy shows that their personal differences carried into all these activities. The necessity to win political power in Austria led to cooperation among the Austro-Marxists within the tactical decisions of everyday Austrian Social Democratic policy, including their support of socialist participation in the Austrian parliament. The radical philosophy of Max Adler and the integral role of class struggle in the thinking of Otto Bauer strained their cooperation with the bourgeois political parties, but the weight of the pacifistic, civilized norms of Viennese culture dominated the thinking of both men; they joined their fellows in the maintenance of a unified political program that was much more evolutionary than revolutionary, reflecting, as Vincent J. Knapp has indicated, more a Lassallean democratic socialism than a Marxist socialism. Before World War I the Austro-Marxists were prone to follow the lead of Victor Adler and the other party fathers in matters of practical policy; after the war some of the more radical implications of Marxist social theory were promoted by Max Adler and Otto Bauer, even though the prewar norms of compromise and vacillation still accompanied these trends.6 On the nationality question the Austro-Marxists joined the majority thinking in their party, which favored the hegemony of German culture within a multinational Austria, in short, the system that had existed for centuries. There was a sound economic reason for continuation of a state that included territories in which other nationalities were the majority of the population; the truncated German Austria after World War I demonstrated their wisdom in seeking to maintain a larger, more economically varied territory. In 1897 the Austrian Social Democratic party had created a federal structure for its organization in an effort to appease the separatist aspirations of other Austrian nationals within the party. Its state policy was similar but did not emanate from a sense of equality; rather, it was a compromise all the German-Austrians agreed upon in order to preserve the state as it was.
Every period of culture inherits a particular set of problems and a momentum in social behavior from its antecedents. This inheritance affects what individuals in that society come to consider as valid purposes, as well as how they choose to pursue those purposes. Although the Austro-Marxist inheritance contained many biases and cultural weaknesses, it included a respect for science and the historical breadth and depth of European humanism. The Austro-Marxists wished to modify society, but even more vital for them was the completion of a scientific basis to serve that change. Their interest in the historical development of ideas and in epistemology reflects the value their culture placed on mental experience and thought; conversely, it indicates the lack of reinforcement the culture gave to change in the material facts of the environment. The Austro-Marxists, and Austrian Social Democrats, ascribed to Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”;7 yet they realized that scientific study of the problems of life in society in many dimensions was needed to prepare a ground for thorough, effective action. Their treatment of ideas as entities to be studied, rather than too quickly applied, did not reduce them to ineffectual social agents.
Karl Marx, whose thought grew in a time and place when western European culture reinforced material change in social, economic, and political conditions, never completed an adequate epistemology to support his ideas of praxis, dialectical materialism, or alienation; his writings on the role of consciousness and language in cultural activity are more suggestive than demonstrative. Moreover, he did not develop evidential studies that clearly demonstrated his general theory of dialectical development of social-cultural institutions in history, although his work on capital was a model for such studies. One man cannot transform society by himself. Marx’s seminal ideas awaited the work of social theorists such as the Austro-Marxists, who could bring facts to light through investigations of law, politics, industries, art, education, and so forth, which validated and amplified the constructs Marx had bequeathed to his Nachwuchs.
The full development of an idea in its meanings and applications requires generations. An idea provides the what, why, how, where, and when of what it comprehends; it provides the direction of the evidence that will substantiate it and suggests methods to pursue its validation in culture. One generation may work at articulating the broad or environmental implications of an idea; a second generation may devote its thought to methods of proof; a third generation may dedicate itself to applying the idea as a change agent in culture.8 The Austro-Marxists were an ideal generation to complete the establishment of proofs for Marxist thought. They had inherited a stable if oppressive society; their conative and cognitive education proceeded by reasoned steps. They were not Marxist revisionists, for unlike Bernstein they did not see Marx’s ideas as inadequate for modern society but rather as needing full development. The problems of their generation were dictated by the comprehensive scientific and social paradigms of their forebears, which carved out a universe of meaning that awaited detailed proofs and social implementation.
The strongest element of the Austro-Marxist set of ideas was its connection to past thought. Their writings always had a relational explicitness that linked their ideas to cultural predecessors. Max Adler’s study of pioneers in socialist thought, Wegweiser. Studien zur Geistesgeschichte des Sozialismus (1914), remains a readable and informative source of intellectual history. Relational thought has positive and negative implications in the development and transmission of effective ideas, and the Austro-Marxists exemplified both. When one stresses relational thought, he can have a healthy counterpoint with the past or present thinker, developing another’s thought in the light of his own ideas and thus broadening the context of argument. He can use the other’s evidence and argument to legitimize his own. Such a habit of mind breeds an evolutionary attitude toward one’s social environment; because the main idea one treats has existed over time, the world in which the idea was engendered is respected. The negative elements of relational thinking enter with this respect for past thought. When a thinker adheres to the principal definitions and implications of a past thinker, he may consider himself part of a family, for the secure meaning provided by an accepted thinker in a past generation, particularly if he has created a school of followers, can be comforting. The genealogy of fellow thinkers allows the same easy access and support in idea that a family tradition secures. The Austro-Marxists tended to devote an inordinate amount of energy to what Nietzsche condemned as Epigonentum, a historicity of thought that subtly negated the creation of new ideas. Evolution often requires a revolutionary short-term action, as Freud demonstrated in his relation to medical psychiatry. Leon Trotsky avoided the Austro-Marxists while he lived in Vienna before World War I because he sensed that their awe in the face of their cultural fathers would rule them out as revolutionaries.9 Nevertheless, relational thought provides one’s contemporaries, as well as intellectual historians, with a coherent network of ideas and sources with which to assimilate a statement. The Austrian-German intellectual, as a rule, promoted cultural evolution through the care he took in providing a well-annotated guide for all those interested in continuing study or practice in the ideas and institutions he celebrated. Max Adler’s Wegweiser, Karl Renner’s Staat und Nation (1899), Otto Bauer’s Die Nationalitaetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907), and Friedrich Adler’s Ernst Machs Ueberwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (1918), each a major work of the author, are excellent histories of ideas.
The Austro-Marxists were not untouched by the intellectual current of “subjectivity,” which Europe cultivated between 1890 and World War I. The subjective value of human thought and the human personality was reaffirmed against the materialism of the nineteenth century. Austrian-German intellectuals were leaders in this return to selfhood. The art of expressionism, the physics of relativity, the psychodynamics of the unconscious, and literature, drama, and poetry emphasizing individual existential responsibility surrounded the young Austro-Marxists. Max Adler and Friedrich Adler were particularly susceptible to these influences, perhaps because of an inherent psychological disposition which Carl Gustav Jung describes as the “introverted thinking type.”10 For the introverted thinker, the subjective aspects of experience are seen to condition how one perceives and shapes external reality. The two Adlers balanced their sensitivity to the role of individual consciousness with an awareness of the interdependence of individuals, thus avoiding a subjective attitude that would have ignored the social being of the individual. Their care in probing the manner in which the individual mind responds to reality ensured that they would escape the one-sided social view that failed to investigate how and why individual decisions in social interaction are made. Max Adler furthered the thought of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Adler augmented the ideas of Ernst Mach in their common view that the history of culture was one of progress in the social ordering of society based upon an increasing awareness of human interdependence. Both Kantian and Machian philosophies were significant reinforcements to the return to subjectivity for socialists in particular because their focus on identifying the laws or processes of consciousness, and thereby the socializing principles of the human mind, stressed a dimension of selfhood that was the same for everyone. With this knowledge, the human community might more quickly discover and adequately implement forms of social interaction that allowed for the full development of human potential.
Karl Renner and Otto Bauer were also positively influenced by their age’s reinforcement of individuality and the subjective realm of human experience, although their natural inclination was not in that direction. Renner and Bauer may be described as the “extroverted thinking type.”11 The extroverted thinker finds meaning in events rather than ideas, or if he is sensitive to epistemology and psychology, he will choose a philosophy that subordinates consciousness to external influences. Jung points out that if an extroverted thinker represses the truths of subjectivity, his thought will begin to reflect these omissions in a negative manner; the logical development of his constructions will be invaded by personalized aspersions to other thinkers and petty references to his own person. Similarly, when the introvert neglects the objective breadth of reality, his thought will suffer the intrusion of this aspect of existence in the use of mundane, overgeneralized examples of human interaction and public life. Renner and Bauer did recognize the individual and subjective in their treatment of issues of nationality and ethnicity, just as the two Adlers compensated their emphasis on consciousness with a view of social reality. Austro-Marxist ideas that remain seminal are so because of this balance. Renner was more adept than Bauer at blending individual and autobiographical example with his writings. Bauer experienced recurrent personality problems, which stemmed from his earliest years and obstructed his introspection and his ability to see the individuality of others. The value of Renner and Bauer for their time, and for ours, may be traced to their extroverted inclination. Extroversion in a politically active individual, if tempered with theoretical distance, can enable intelligent concentration on day-to-day events, the very stuff of social reality from which the introvert withdraws. Both Renner and Bauer combined an intense involvement in the activities of their culture with an ability to analyze and synthesize political events according to ingenious structures of idea; and even when these formulations are incomplete or distorted by cultural biases or personal problems, they provide a platform for reflection upon the issues involved.
The issues that Renner and Bauer inclined toward involved their political and social environment: nationality and ethnicity, the structure of government, the conduct of politics, economic development, and foreign policy. Although Max Adler and Friedrich Adler occasionally addressed these issues, they did so only in moments of social crisis, and then they did not treat the issue with a timely, tactical strategy but with a philosophical principle that was held to be valid at any time. Renner and Bauer could be theoretical about nationality, Parliament, the Danube economy, and Balkan diplomacy, but their strength was in writings that made choices and suggested strategies, using theory analytically rather than as a deductive construct. The nationality question was central to Renner and Bauer because of its omnipresence in the politics of of the Austrian multinational state and the special problems the concepts of nationality and ethnicity raised for a Marxist. If national boundaries and ethnic enclaves were merely a consequence of certain stages of economic development, then perhaps such cultural distinctions should disappear. Renner argued for preservation of ethnic integrity, and he sought to create an idea of the multinational state that could be justified in the light of Marx’s caution against past concepts of order such as the hierarchical state or territorial nationality. He conceived the notion of a national “personality” that transcended territorial boundaries and would be integral to the identity of an individual even in a socialist state. He borrowed the concept from the Carolingian legal code, ingeniously shaping ancient law to fit modern needs. Renner’s deliberations included sociological theory as well as legal history; he explored the questions of nationality and ethnicity extensively enough to leave a body of literature that can help us think through these concepts as they increase in importance for our culture.
Otto Bauer saw ethnic integrity as only a moment in the social-economic movement of history; for an individual to adhere to an ethnic heritage that had no roots in the reality of the social-economic present was an error of consciousness that prevented him from making history. Ethnic groups such as the German nation were justified by the conditions of the time; they were culture-makers. Most Slavic nationalities within the Austrian state were seen as representing outdated heritages; they would be closer to historical truth if they were assimilated to the German nationality. Bauer based his arguments on the dialectical materialism of Marx. Yet despite Bauer’s bias toward German culture, the questions he raised about the substance of ethnicity and nationality are significant. He introduced the classic debate between cultural anthropology and biology over the fundamental cause of individual and group character.12 As a Marxist, Bauer strongly supports the role of culture in creating what he terms a “community of character”; he recognized biological causes in character but was less skillful in using inherited traits in his arguments. He used a variation of Renner’s personality principle of nationality to justify the ability of an individual to change nationalities on the basis of intelligent decision, no matter what territory he might live in or what heritage might encompass him. This dimension of his discussion reflects Bauer’s struggle to deal with a highly painful family background and his Jewish heritage, which his father’s generation had largely rejected.
Finally, in introducing the Austro-Marxist ideas, we must touch upon the relation of the thinkers to new social scientific research methods and forms of evidence developed at the turn of the century. The mid-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Marx and Darwin had formulated comprehensive theories that promised to explain the causes and connections of all phenomena in their respective areas of study, but their substantiation of these grand schemes had hardly begun. Researchers in the generations that followed devised new strategies for the collection of evidence in behalf of these guiding theories, seeking proofs within the environments of natural and social life. The research methods of the social sciences in the nineteenth century stressed documentary evidence—statistics, demographics, and thoughtful and thorough discussions of what could and should be, as well as of what was. The natural sciences had introduced field observation, but it was informal, and even more so in the infant social sciences. The new forms of research in the social sciences intensified field work, developing four areas of seeking evidence that would be used to validate ideas: study of cultural artifacts, inferring human intention and meaning; study of direct communication, that is, verbal and nonverbal expression; study of the mind’s operation and structure and their implications to social life; and observation of human behavior. The Austro-Marxists used some of these forms of evidence and avoided some. Consideration of their research methods in the light of what was being done around them helps us to understand their strengths as thinkers and can provide us with further knowledge about the reasons for their failure to develop certain directions of thought.
Detailed content studies of cultural artifacts to elicit the lines of thought that shaped them were made in fields that ranged from law, literature, and the fine arts to psychiatry at the turn of the century. Contributors to this sphere among the German contemporaries of the Austro-Marxists included the sociologist Georg Simmel, the anthropologist Franz Boas, the psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, who contributed to all four areas of new research, and the neo-Kantian social philosopher Rudolf Stammler, whose critical review of legal codes opened up a new approach to cultural interpretation. Karl Renner’s study of law was similar to that of Stammler in that it related the semantics of the legal expression to a broader cultural intention. The careful study of an artifact, turning it around in one’s mind’s eye until all its possible meanings and implications were discovered, was a particular strength of the Austro-Marxists. It may have reflected the inheritance of a cultural style of Austrian humanism. The Austrian humanist was like Monet at his lily pond; he spent the greater part of a lifetime rendering interpretations of the same subject with a constant attitude and idea. Max Adler did with intellectual biographies of social thinkers what Renner did with laws; for Adler, a thinker and a body of thought were both artifacts to be probed for obvious and hidden implications. As with Renner, his study was not simply traditional criticism; it expanded into what may be termed phenomenological study, for it constructed inferential worlds of meaning beyond, yet based upon, the artifact’s obvious qualities and intentions. Friedrich Adler reserved these investigations to the history of scientific method, and we see flashes of it in some of his Marxist writings. Otto Bauer is the only Austro-Marxist who lacked the patience for these thorough reviews of cultural artifacts, a consequence of the tension placed upon his thought by his emotional problems.
The second area of social evidence, direct communications, was new to cultural study. Psychiatry had opened the way through Freud in the 1890s, and soon sociologists such as Max Weber included firsthand reports on cultural activity as vital evidence in interpreting cultural meaning.13 Formal interviews or even informal recording of the statements of others were never significant to Austro-Marxist thought. Nor did they pursue the study of human behavior. There are several reasons for their neglect of these areas, one lying in the nature of the Marxist paradigm, another in the norms of the Austrian culture, and another in their inherent style of thought. The Marxist paradigm sought cultural explanation in social conditions; words and behavior were related to more general causes; no words or behavior were unique to a person, rather they were common styles of classes of persons. Institutional patterns of behavior seen at a distance were sufficient to expose class traits; language was a vehicle of class ideas, thus the printed word was adequate to capture the semantic evidence. The norms of Austrian culture legislated against the direct observation of normal fellow citizens or interviewing them to seek evidence to support hypotheses. Although these methods had been introduced by Max Weber to the German culture in the first decade of the twentieth century, they were used sparingly in social scientific research before World War I. When used, they were applied in industry to workers but not to middle- or upper-class citizens. Literate Europeans used the arguments of social science to justify a social-economic philosophy and to ascribe right or wrong to social practices. Weber’s effort to bring what he called “ethical neutrality” and objectivity to society through these new methods that judged an individual’s language and behavior from a “value-free” distance was seen as a violation of the literate person’s disclosure of values.14
The Austro-Marxists used language and acts to justify their rightness and listened to others in order to blame or to educate them, as was the norm with other politically aware citizens of Austria. The temperaments of the Austro-Marxists and their style of thought also prevented adoption of these new methods. Max Adler and Friedrich Adler chose to study inanimate artifacts rather than undertake intense scientific work involving contact with living persons, a preference reflecting their introverted nature. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer thrived on interaction, but it was competitive in Bauer’s case and genial for Renner; neither man wished to study contact with another person but preferred as an extravert to be nourished by the direct emotional and intellectual meaning of the social exchange.
Study of the mind’s operation and structure in order to gather evidence that could support a clearer understanding and implementation of social intelligence was the most important means of investigation for both Max Adler and Friedrich Adler. Their interest in the laws of consciousness was significantly different in its major aim than the new direction of depth psychology pursued by Freud, Alfred Adler, and Jung, or even the similar epistemological motive of the phenomenological school begun by Edmund Husserl.15 These investigators of the mind neglected the theme of socializing consciousness in their studies, conceiving social reality as a negative concept arrived at by the addition of individual realities. Both Max Adler and Friedrich Adler could have made profound contributions to the psychology and epistemology of political values and social change, but neither developed these promising theoretical directions because of a hesitation to become an original contributor to culture, a tragic aberration in each man that has denied posterity important thought. The theoretical ground for their study was completed sufficiently to provide a basis for further investigation. Max Adler’s works on Kant and Marx are still prolegomenas for future thinking about the nature of social intelligence, and Friedrich Adler’s biography of Ernst Mach is a history of science that demonstrates how the processes of consciousness may be located in the mind’s artifacts, that is, in the study of scientific theory and its construction. Actual study of the mind in its operative modes and discovery of its laws requires observation of the mind’s activity in relation to the creation of human artifacts.
Max Adler’s studies of other thinkers might have been the source of the analysis needed to dissect the nature of social intelligence. In one brilliant passage in which he analyzed Goethe’s Faust in the midst of reflection, Adler demonstrated a path of phenomenological criticism that may yet be developed.16 But Adler did not follow his own insight. There were many social philosophers whose use of artifacts in the study of laws of consciousness could have reinforced him, such as Georg Simmel, for whom he had a guarded admiration, and especially the neo-Kantians, who sought evidence of social intelligence in ethics, law, and pedagogy.17 His use of other thinkers is largely appreciative and critical but not productive in the sense of developing a philosophically refined outline of social consciousness. His irrational self-limitation was rooted in his hesitation to become a cultural father with a mature body of work; he remained what Jung has called a puer aeternus, an eternal youth. This study will elucidate how he diverted his thought, perhaps how to continue it to its promised fruition, but most certainly, how the psychological defenses of the personality can turn the careful construction of a complex idea into a metaphor that dissipates thought.
Friedrich Adler likewise refused to become a productive cultural father. He constantly undercut his own accomplishment by subsuming his intellect and vision to that of both his personal and his cultural father. He lived uncannily in the model of the tragic figure of Oedipus, a life script that channeled his independence and intellectual promise into a circular strife of inherited problems. The German-Austrian intelligentsia who overcame this inheritance did so only because they identified the problems clearly and lived through them with their intellect and action relatively uncompromised, neither giving in to the norms prematurely nor distorting them. Men such as Freud, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Wittgenstein, and Husserl dealt with the historicity that swallowed new insight and perpetuated a laziness of thought that overlooked incongruent action by offering new forms of self-observation and cultural criticism. Their thought helps us in modern culture individually arrive at the facts of our immediate life. The Austro-Marxists might have helped us arrive at the collective facts of our social life with an equivalent insight if they, too, had adequately confronted the negative aspects of their inheritance.