ABSTRACT
The topicality of the problem of ethnicity and/or nationalism can easily be ascertained by just reading the newspapers or watching the evening news on television in our living rooms. This chapter looks at the theories of a group of intellectuals of the left in Vienna and Budapest, the two capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in the last decades of its existence prior to its dissolution in 1918. The essence of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was best captured by two eminent members of the disintegrating Empire, the writer Robert Musil and the socialist politician, Victor Adler. Austrian liberty is a hybrid creature, midway between Russian liberty and German liberty. As a theoretical and political movement, Austro-Marxism was a response to the changed socioeconomic conditions of world capitalism, and also to the specific problems of the multiethnic Austrian-Hungarian society. Their theoretical concerns were published in the marxstudien and in the monthly, Der Kampf.
