ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses John Boyer’s work in terms of urban political culture throughout the Austrian monarchy and looks at work on developments outside of Austria. Making imperial Austria itself a point of comparison for Boyer’s work helps to avoid confusing this work with a definitive work on Habsburg domestic politics and political culture at the turn of the century, as some have tended to read it. Boyer’s first book, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, showed the broken ring of a new political coalition in Vienna, one that eventually replaced the ruling Liberal Party in municipal government. In asserting that the Christian Socials represent the key transition point to a new type of politics, Boyer wants to show the logic, coherence, and detailed structures underlying a political transformation that for too long had been considered sudden, surprising, anti-rational, emotional, and even illogical.
