The arts and sciences

The twenty-five years before the First World War were an era of triumphant intellectual innovation whose consequences would echo across the twentieth century. This was the period of the rise of artistic and literary modernism, of the formulation of the classic sociological theories of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and of what contemporaries were calling revolutionary new theories in physics – in retrospect, a fully justified designation.