ABSTRACT
John Boyer’s two volume history of Christian Socialism from its beginnings to the end of the Habsburg Monarchy is a formidable achievement of dedicated scholarship. The first volume has already fundamentally changed our perception of what was happening in Vienna at the turn of the century, and the second volume contributes further food for thought which will likely lead to further historiographical shifts. An attempt to assess the importance of Boyer’s work for current scholarship on the Habsburg Monarchy, and the history of Vienna in particular, has to address some central tasks. Boyer offered a radically different picture of what happened socially and politically in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The view with most currency in 1981 was that of Carl E. Schorske, who, in a series of essays subsequently included in a famous volume, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, had sought to explain Viennese cultural modernism by linking it to the political crises of the time, especially the rise of anti-liberalism.
