Conclusion: Austria and the Transition to Modernity

Summary

The dissolution of morality, as that was conceived in both classical and Christian terms, and the fracturing of the inherited Western world-view into a diversity of incommensurable perspectives, which is accomplished in Nietzsche's thought, are irreparable, and any cultural losses they may entail are irretrievable.

— John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age

THIS STUDY BEGAN WITH AN EXAMINATION of the extreme difficulty of defining the concept of “modernity.” Fredric Jameson concluded that it was not a concept at all but a “narrative category,” that it should be used to describe the thinking and sensibility of an age that considers itself different from the age that preceded it. At the outset it was also asserted that the notion of modernity could only have meaning when it was anchored in a particular historical context. These two considerations can be combined in a general conclusion about the modernization of Austria, namely, that the two “ages” in question — a dynastically ordered, seemingly stable ancien régime and a rapidly industrializing, socially mobile, unstable modern period — were consecutive epochs in Austria to a lesser extent than in other comparable states in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Until the fall of Habsburg Austria in 1918, the ancien régime and the modern era briefly intermingled and coexisted, with each throwing the other into greater relief. This was the epoch of profound transition in which Robert Musil, the most important of the three authors examined, grew up.