ABSTRACT
A work like Ernst Hanisch’s social history cannot stand without a methodological and theoretical framework, and is thus naturally indebted to other works. As far as methodology is concerned, the intellectual affinity with the studies of the Annales-School is obvious, the more so, as Hanisch explicitly cites Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre several times. The technique of systematic change of perspective between quantitative data and oral history, which Hanisch consciously uses as a stylistic device, gives his text a special flavor. In any case, his particular style prevents the book from being a rigorous work of scholarship. Hanisch willingly acknowledges his debt to some thinkers, for example the economist Rudolf Hilferding , the political scientists Stein Rokkan and Arend Lijphart, and others. Hanisch makes up for the loss by writing all the more extensively about the Austrian fin-de-siecle culture and its echoes in the interwar period.
