Serguei GLEBOV (SG). My first question, and it seems to me that it can be a good introduction into our discussion, is about the concept of “modernity” and its relation to such concepts as “modernization” and “modernism”. If you look at your academic and scholarly career, if you look back at it in a sense, then what does modernity mean for you? And can you outline connections between modernity, modernization and modernism?

Carl SCHORSKE (S). Modernity for me is a broad historical concept, which really is related to… Well, you could start it in the Renaissance, but I like to think of it somewhat more narrowly, as related to the problems issuing from the two great revolutions, the industrial and the French Revolution. Both these revolutions are for me connected with the beginning of economic modernization and then they take various forms; they affect culture but they don’t necessarily make modernism out of culture. That is a later development. I think of modernism (I think it would be generally acceptable) as a cultural term. It is to be distinguished from, though related to, problems of modernity.

SG. I was wondering if we could put it into the context of history and social science in the American academia. One tends to think of modernization as a concept and a tool in humanities and social sciences in particular during the period after World War II. How can we put it into a long duree perspective?

S. Firstly I would have to say that although the term “modernization” was not given much currency until after World War I, there was in the US in particular a phenomenon like it before WWI. In England too there was a conception of social and economic and political modernization and a scholarship of it that antedates WWI. I think first of our Chicago historical school that included people like James Harvey Robinson and Charles and Mary Beard in history; John Dewey in philosophy; Albion Small and Thorstein Veblen in sociology. All these scholars were involved in different ways with the attempt to grapple with the industrial revolution and its consequences in our advanced capitalist society whose injustices were being strongly felt. They tended to be on the side of reformers and their scholarship was partly informed by and stimulated by the attempts to mitigate the social costs of the market economy. So, modernization as a historical phenomenon has been subjected to quite a lot of scrutiny in the past. When I went to college in the years l932-l936, we had as an introductory course, something which was inspired in a way by this still vital intellectual “progressivist tradition”, as we called it. We followed three different lines in Western European development (it was all very Eurocentric. I mean, the ignoring of Asia, Africa, everything else is, by modern standards, rather unthinkable, though of course a great deal of Eurocentrism persists here and in Europe). So, the notion was that one should study simultaneously (and we did it that way) economic history, social history, political history and intellectual history. These four strands, with separate readings in each strand provided the diachronic structure of the course. Because my college, Columbia, was educationally pioneering, with instructors who were deeply influenced by Dewey and by Charles Beard, both of whom were at different times Columbia professors. The main thing was to conceive as a united field subdivided into perspectival aspects the history of European development from the ancient world to the present. This was elementary instruction that one received as a freshman, and I had had a flavor of it even in high school in the late 1920s and ‘30’s This was in the 30s, in Columbia College, not in every college, that was a progressive institution, as we thought of it then. And in truth, you can hear resonating here some of the holistic conceptions of history that you find in Karl Marx. He was one of the first great synthesizers of the historical outlook to pay attention to more than just politics. Socialism made a huge contribution – not just Marxian socialism – all forms, including our progressivist tradition, which is strictly bourgeois sociologically but conceptually, intellectually, it is already motivated by the sympathy you often get in the elites, the educated elites, or in those parts of it not bound by immediate interest, for the condition of the working class, the condition of the peasantry, etc. Max Weber was no different… So I would say that this conception of modernization was already in some sectors of American education. I did not have to invent such a thing, it was part of a deep structure.

SG. You have been at times critical about the trajectory that humanities and social sciences were moving along. Could you possibly comment on the critical voices with respect to modernization theories, in particular after World War II?

S. The critique of modernization on the whole came from the people who were preoccupied with developments that did not originate within the academy itself. Immediately after WWII, with the coming of the Cold War and the rivalry with the Soviet Union we had the development of a scientization of academic culture, varied in character but very pervasive. I have edited (with Thomas Bender) a book on the academic culture in the US, where I sought to show that, through scientization, a process was going on which would eliminate the historical perspective. At this point you might say I became very conservative in relation to the way in which academic culture was developing. There was a great move toward specialization and autonomization. Each discipline was adopting its own protocols, its own criteria and procedures of understanding. The tendency in the study of society was for the models to be based on the natural sciences. This was especially true in the United States: we developed behavioralism and quantitative methods in political and social science. Economics, with refined mathematical methods, became pure market economics that banished social considerations from playing a role in the theory itself. …In philosophy, the change was most pronounced, for the shift to the Anglo-Saxon analytic school banished most of the issues that we had inherited from German idealism. Even in pragmatism, which was deeply anchored in some of its aspects in German idealism, when you start to get rid of that and you start to think that philosophy is only able to deal effectively only with logic, science and language, you narrow the field of concern. That’s what was going on everywhere – you narrow the field of concern of a discipline, so that you black out many constituents of social and cultural experience. That I found to be very dangerous. In general, we witnessed after the War a polarization of the humanities and the social sciences, with the value concerns put in one camp while the social-scientific concern for examining society “objectively” was put in another. The polarization in the quest for pure theory in many disciplines resulted in the de-humanization of the social sciences and the de-socialization of the humanities. When you have these two tendencies simultaneously, one of the things that also gets bracketed out is history! The historical perspective goes. This results in a scholarship locked into the criteria of the present, generated in the present, and attentive only to the present, because history has no function or utility for you if you are giving your loyalty to a-temporal scientific procedures.

SG. It seems to me that here we have an interesting parallel, because this a-historicism was also a part of the developments in the second half of the 19th century in Europe, with the rise of modernism as a cultural phenomenon.

S. Yes, yes, that is true.

SG. If we can go into this direction and talk about Viennese modernism specifically, how can this retreat from historical perspective in the late 19th century be explained?

S. It is, of course, very difficult to explain. I feel what you have to do is to consider it in a matrix of developments. There are so many aspects to emerging modernism that just to focus on the de-historicization of the cultural consciousness is too thin a basis to construct an interpretation on. I feel something else was going on, I mean, let’s say, I will just give you very raw examples: modernism includes, in the arts for example, the tendency toward abstraction. It also incorporates a tendency for enormous interiorization, de-socialization, a focus on the inner life of the psyche, on the life of instinct, of emotion. The latter brings with it a tendency toward irrationalism. Abstraction can of course be highly rationalistic. Yet it can be paired in some measure with something truly non-rational, or at least find meaning and give salience for a dimension of experience which is psychological. Thus Freud aims to a scientific rationalist, but the object of his abstractions is the functioning of non-rational instinct. Schoenberg, giving expression to extreme psychological states by the liberation of dissonance that destroys the traditional diatonic system in music, then devises a duodecaphonic system of order that is hyper-rational in nature to contain in form the new world of emotion he has projected. A historical order has been destroyed to reach a new, modern truth; a modern language has been created to express it. Vienna (to use that as an example), the rise of economics, a really remarkable efflorescence, I made nothing of it in my book, I mean if I have written another book I would have included the economists, because they are very rich and fertile. Within economics were contained two currents: on the one hand, the beginnings of a very abstract and mathematical equilibrium economics; on the other, a socially-oriented economics, such as that of Leopold Wieser and the Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Both were in the seminar of Böhm-Bawerk, a pioneer in fiscal theory. Perhaps the most striking thinker in that seminar was Joseph Schumpeter. He developed a theory that unified abstract, rationalistic equilibrium theory (he called it “circular flow”) with a historical conception of “creative destruction” due to the introduction of new technologies, such as the steam engine or electricity, that disrupted the established economic equilibrium. Thus rational and non-rational factors were interlinked: Tradition and natural law theory bespeaks continuity in economic life and thought, while unpredictable creativity spells rupture.

The members of Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar thus range from classical economists of a new and higher abstraction through Marxist historicists to Schumpeter who combines the modern and the historistic. They all have ties in different directions, to portions of the culture, some of which are breaking from tradition. Now, de-historicization and a break from tradition overlap, but they are not the same. And this is a very difficult thing to keep in mind, when you are struggling with these problems, and you must be very careful not to confuse the challenging of tradition which can come in very traditionalistic ways or a challenge to tradition that comes from a feeling that there is a rupture in history, which must be accounted for and so you go after the rupture. That is as in the case of Schumpeter, historical but not traditionalistic.

SG. This leads me to a question about the connection between modernism as a cultural phenomenon of the late 19th century and historical consciousness. If you could also relate these two themes to the regional perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, it would make our discussion even more interesting for our readership. Your recent book, Thinking with History, is an illustration of the dependence of modern mind on history and its attempts to overcome this dependence. What are the specific forms this might have taken?

S. There are generational ruptures in a cultural consciousness where the culture of the fathers no longer seems satisfactory to the sons and that leads to a generational break, in which, then, there is a rupture in the way of thinking, in the line of thought etc. On the other hand, one generation after another can go by without a cultural rupture, if you have a static society, a relatively static society. There the fathers and the sons may be in great tension, but the sons do not seek to replace the fathers’ culture, only to become their fathers’ successors in the same cultural way of life and thought etc., with no sense of break! At that point there is continuity and not rupture. Maybe three generations will go on like that and then all of the sudden there will be a general generational conflict. I feel that one useful thing is to ask about a common generational experience – now I am using the word experience in a very wide sense – that conditions its consciousness. And it can be an experience that takes place in one field, let us say, the experience of World War I. That really did bring about a rupture in consciousness and a rupture in forms of expression in art and philosophy, and so on, so that they were innovative, novel, something that had not been perceived before. The experience that led to this was not an experience that was in and of itself intra-intellectual. It was experience that was social, it was a group experience, a group traumatization is a possible word for it; or a sudden awareness that an ancient world will not do. For example, at the close of World War I (this is how difficult these problems get) let us just take the arts. We have across the board (I am speaking now of Europe) the advent of rationalistic, abstract kind of art emergent, sometimes very mathematical in character, geometric in forms (if it’s painting or architecture). We have an international movement in style that extends from France to Russia. In France, it is the very bourgeois, very rationalistic esprit nouveaux group that espouses new and modern rationalistic forms of presentation, revolting against naturalism (it is not interested in it anymore). And it produces forms that express what they call le rappel à l’ordre, in the name of a rationalist new start for man. They attach in that sense to a French republican, rationalist and even technological tradition. Art should cease worrying itself, like Proust and other pre-war French poets had done, about the psychological inner life, upper class social relations, or refined senuous aesthetic experience. It’s another ballgame.

At the same time in Russia there is a similar neo-rationalism in constructivism; in Germany’s Weimar Republic there is the Neue Sachlichkeit, there is the Bauhaus. Every one of these post-war societies leans to the creation of a similar kind of style, that becomes known in the end (and it was first named that by Americans) the international style. It was one European style in architecture (with some kindred phenomena in painting), a revolt against ornament; it was highly formalistic, but rationalistic, in all of these cultures, despite their deep socio-political differences. Constructivism too – it’s got a lot of elements in which rationalism is recognized, but it’s being critically recombined– it’s not being affirmed as a source of truth or enrichment of experience. One style, three social systems – Russian communism (far end); French capitalism and technocratic republicanism, very bourgeois; Weimar social democracy (Germany between the other two political cultures) - just in these few years, the 1920s. All three artistic cultures have, of course, pre-War antecedents, but they all come up at the same time with a rationalist international language.
I have just received the catalogue of an exhibition in Los Angeles, it must be a marvelous one, on the Central European avant-gardes between the wars. The stress is on all the lands between France and Russia – Germany is in it, but the important things are Hungary, Poland, all the intermediate countries, what we sometimes call East Central Europe. You were also a graduate of the Central European University, were you not?

SG. Yes, I was indeed.

S. Then, you know the importance of the Hungarian inter-war avant-garde, for example. If you would ask for the social explanations of its development in the ordinary sense, what the hell should these people be doing this for? The conceptual, intellectual, artistic developments can run ahead of society, they don’t lag behind, they run ahead. Thought and ideas travel faster than social developments. In the disjunction between modernization in the social sphere and modernism in the cultural sphere, new creative possibilities are generated, if you like. The economically backward countries can become advanced countries in culture – Look at the Russian literature of the l9th century, or the Latin American novel in the 20th. At times they are incredibly, incredibly advanced. The intellectuals and artists tend to be marginalized, and marginals are often socially and culturally very creative.

SG. My next question will follow on this interesting regional dimension that our discussion is taking now. I wonder if the explosion of modernist creativity in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century (this explosion is quite obvious as your work demonstrated for Vienna, in Russia this period is known as the Silver Age of Russian culture, the time when great revival of art, literature, music is taking place, and similar developments can be observed in Germany, Hungary, etc) cannot be explained as a symptom of a Sonderweg of Central and Eastern Europe. Let me elaborate on this question a little bit. Admittedly, conditions in all these countries were very different, and degrees, to which there was participation by the educated classes in political life, possibly varied as well. And yet, compared to Great Britain and France, in Central and Eastern Europe educated classes could hardly find sufficient outlet for their energies in political life. Assuming that this is one of the factors that accounts for the difference between more democratic West and less democratic East or Central Europe, can we view the modernist ferment as an expression of this specificity?

S. I am hesitant to read it this way because I find that the conditions in these countries varied – just this one point. For example, in Russia, to me the great example of innovative power related to the incapacity to actualize new values in politics would be in the 19th century, with the great flowering of social analysis through literature, from Pushkin to Chekhov. That whole incredible fertility, where the Russians’ writing became the place where in some ways the dilemmas of advanced society were expressed by people who lived in a backward one. And most of these creative people seem to me to be related either to the gentry, aristocracy or they are related in some way to free professions. They are not bourgeois in the sense of being economically middle class, they are culturally somewhat privileged by either their education, for which there is a place in society, they can use educated people in the bureaucracy…

SG Kind of Bildungsbuergertum…

S. Exactly, but the stress should be on Bildung, not so much on Buergertum. They are replicating what the Germans had done at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, when all of a sudden the Germans become critically articulate…But now, in the German case and to some extent in the Russian case (I say all this because it has to do with the historical dynamics of modernist development or cultural rupture), the Germans generate their bourgeois intellectual energy in very large part in resistance to French domination. The French cultural domination takes place through German courts and academies. It’s Frederick the Great and other German princes who mobilize people to emulate France to enlarge their power and prestige. They are the Westernizers of Germany, the political, bureaucratic and military modernizers. But against them, the German bourgeois intelligentsia, the great creative classes, really revolted critically, from Lessing and Kant to the romantics and the Hegelians. They are in moral revolt against Western positivistic rationalism, which they see partly as an instrument of state, of oppression. While in its critical aspect, rationalism has to be adopted, they felt that, to the degree that it justifies external reality, the way things are, rationalism has to be resisted. There is thus a bifurcated attitude, there is an ambiguity, an ambivalence, in the German relation to Western rationalism. What I am trying to say is that the resistance that is generated in culture domestically is connected to foreign domination and therefore not unlike the struggle between “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers”. Because in Russia there is also a similar development – some are on one side, some are on the other side – but they all confront the same problem. The problem is not borrowing the culture – it’s concern for the social and moral consequences of the culture. That’s where it hits, that’s where it gets hold. The amazing thing is that the best of Russian political thought in some ways comes out of the literary people; to a lesser extent that is the way it was in Germany before. But in Germany, the professors come to play a larger role in intellectual and political development. Germany becomes “das Land der Dichter und Denker” – the land of poets and thinkers (philosophers). [Under Hitler, the epithet was sardonically transposed into “das Land der Richter und Henker” – the land of judges and hangmen.]

SG It seems to me that you are not inclined to see the modernist cultural ferment in CEE as an expression of a Sonderweg…

S. I feel every country has a Sonderweg, but no country has a total Sonderweg…This is the problem, it’s the overlap. Then the combinations that you get are very peculiar. I can give you as an example Hungarian modernism in architecture: Here come these people: by the late nineties the Hungarians are generating a marvelous, an amazing group of progressivists, whether it’s Bartok in music, Ady in poetry or Lukacs in philosophy. These people have a very peculiar thing: you can call them Westernizers, if you like, for they are full of democratic values, and are self-consciously modernists. (Lukacs is, to be sure, not exactly democratic; he had a German Sonderweg, so to speak, to become an aesthete German style, a very special thing, before he turned to society and Marxism). But in any case, what is interesting in the Hungarian progressivists is that they integrate into their late modern social democracy and aesthetic modernism a folkish nationalism. In architecture, this becomes very vivid in somebody like Ödön Lechner. When the architects revolt, they want to be modern, but they want to be national at the same time; that is, they don’t like the historicism of the Austrian Reich. When they look at Austria, they see in it the Ringstrasse, they see the 19th century. They see that at home in the fabric and style of Budapest, patterned on l9th century Vienna by the same kind of people who are running Hungary, the whole liberal elite, a mixture of gentry landlords and capitalists. They don’t like that and they want to modernize. Where do they get their modernism? They have to get that it from Vienna too, at least in part! In Czechoslovakia they won’t even go to Vienna for that. They go to France, they have another model that they can hook onto. The Hungarians simultaneously developed a modernism in basic forms and then they laid on it, in architecture, folk idioms, from the national structure, presumed national heritage, much of which comes out of Transylvania, actually, that’s where they get all this stuff from. Thus the ornamentation that is used in early Hungarian modernism comes from their own turf. In this way, they can revolt against Vienna nationally, yet they can be partners of Vienna in modernism, in so far as Vienna has generated a very creative elite in architecture that is blazing new trails in the field of architecture that are ahead of most of Europe. The Hungarians make their own combination of universalist modernism and local historicism with a populist orientation.

SG. Let me bring our discussion again to the level of modernity in the sense of a larger social and economic phenomenon, not just modernism as a cultural phenomenon. If we take the example of the Dual Monarchy, what is the dynamics of the relationship between state and culture, between social groups that are interested in active modernization and the state?

S. One always has to ask what are the components of the modernization. Let us take the updating of agriculture. Making a modern agriculture is, in a way, part of the scientific revolution in economic life. It is, of course, an earlier stage of the agricultural scientific revolution, the English started to do scientific agriculture in the 16th century; in some sense, and they knew what to do with their wool. So they began to create new forms of landed property, ruinous to the peasant population, the enclosures etc. The agricultural interest at one level becomes deeply identified with capitalism. In Austria it later becomes identified with absolutism in a major way. It’s not so easy to find liberal, Kossuth types, who come from the land or the small towns economic modernizers. Well, the Thuns and the Schwarzenbergs of the Bohemian nobility are loftier socially, yet economic modernizers in the nineteenth century…The Hungarian Count Szechenyi is another model. This is an improving landlord, who has a real eye on capitalist development in all dimensions – economic, scientific and constitutional – who knows that the action is in England. There, he thought, is where we ought to be getting our clues – and our help in modern development. Cavour was similar in Italy. A Piedmontese agricultural interest man, he sought economic modernization and institutions that go with it to regenerate the gentry. For that you look to England…. The Germans are dangerously backward, although some Junkers get very successful in their East European latifundia, their great estates. Well, some of them are liberal, it is a very peculiar thing, we shouldn’t get into too much detail here, for it invites my errors and slips of memory…Yet the details can reveal the mixture of social categories, forms of economy, and responsiveness, creative or otherwise, to the claims of advancing political democratization. They produce very different results. Similarly there varied relations between nationalism, economic modernization and liberalism. In Austria, if you take someone like Schwarzenberg, the one prominent as anti-nationalist in the Revolution of 1848 and architect of absolutism in the 1850s, he is a major force for economic development! He is at one with the bankers, at one with the railroad builders, he is trying to push the state in the direction of the modernization of agriculture. In politics, he is standing pat, he doesn’t want to give an inch, and he is very tough. He figures (and Austrian state policy is very much based on this again in the fin-de-siècle) – we outflank politics by having a great effort in the economy, and a great development in culture, we’ll go in for education, we’ll go in for cultivation of the arts – even of modernism! - which is the big tradition of the Monarchy anyway, let’s now democratize it, let’s really push it and so it gets to the people. And then, if you get people economically prosperous and culturally engaged, you give them a stake in a way in the status quo, you will divert them from and blunt the edge of politics… I exaggerate, of course, but I am only trying to make the case that the scene is laden with paradox, in terms of what seems to be the broadest conception of the relation of modernity and modernism. In the development of modernity in economics, politics society and intellectual culture, flow is never even, as it was in the four streams in my freshmen Western Civilization course at Columbia University. What is happening in the intellectual sphere does not necessarily coincide neatly with what’s happening in the political sphere or in the economic or the social sphere. These things have different paces, and different pressures.

SG. Can we say that in the case of the Monarchy there is a conflict between agents of modernization – the nation-state, or the proto-nation-state, as in Hungarian case, and the Empire at large? In other words, empire and nationalities, what are their relations to each other in the context of modernization?

S. The interesting thing about Austria really is that there is a nationality of the Empire, there is only one, and that’s the Jews. They are the only reliable. And, of course, there are tremendous divisions among the Jews at the time. But the fact is that they want to liberalize, on the whole they are progressive, to the degree that they enter the fabric of the economy in its developing fringe. Of course, to the degree that some were left behind, as a sub-branch of the peasants in a schtetl in Galicia, they can be the most “backward” people, utterly unconnected…But they too are loyal to the Empire because the Emperor can save them from the Ukrainians, the Poles, etc. At the high end many of them can be loyal because they are investors in the railroads, when being close to the state can make you very rich. Through education, they become culturally creative, acceptable, and acquire a social mobility to go with their wealth or transcend it.

SG. Maybe we can continue this topic looking at Jews as imperial nationality in the Dual Monarchy, loyal to the emperor, loyal to the language, in Galicia, for example, they acted as Germanizers…

S. The place where we have to be careful is when the non-German nationalism gets very strong in the Empire; then the Jews are confronted with a tough choice. Thus in Hungary, the Magyarized Jew was somebody who started as a German, because he came to the city, he came to Budapest, and that was a city of trade, a city of wealth, and its elite was German or Germanized under Austrian absolutism. The Jew was not in the political class, he was in an economic class, but, with the rise of Magyar nationalism, liberalism, and rapid economic development, the bourgeoisie became a significant component in the Magyar ruling class, and when it did, the position of the Jews began to change. Their language began to change too. They may still speak German, but they become Magyar Jews. Take Theodore Herzl – his mother was a terrific Germanizer, and he was a man with reverence for German culture. But the fact is that he was also a Hungarian. You never get the Hungarian side of Herzl spoken of, scholars have not explored whatever Magyar component is in his culture. His mother was a Goethe worshipper, is still in the German cultural orbit, which was connected then with the imperial loyalty of the Jews. It was in a sense from Yiddish to German, later from Yiddish or German to Magyar. But if you are a Jew in Czech-speaking provinces such as Bohemia or Moravia, after you can become upwardly mobile, you are likely to become German in your linguistic identity. I got into this topic backwards, through studying Mahler, the life of Mahler, and the little town he was in, a German enclave, Jihlava (Iglau in German). It was an administrative center of the Austrian bureaucracy and a garrison. So his town was truly German. It was a silver town from the 17th century, they are spotted around Bohemia, these silver areas. Then in the nineteenth century it became a textile, center. And when it did, the Jews became industrialists, not many but enough. And then they became real liberals, as did the German gentile bourgeois of the town. And when the liberals came, the German liberals of Iglau, they really fought for the emancipation of the Jews. They wanted the emancipation of the Jews, they felt at one with them. In this German city in a Czech sea, the Czechs were the peasants, the lower classes, the workers and servants, regarded as culturally inferior. The Germans wanted to exploit them, as the Jews also did – unless, like the Jews, they Germanized themselves. The Germans did not pay any attention to their well being or their national cultural and political aspirations, which grew ever stronger over the century. They tried to Germanize them, if they had any talent they should come to school, sure! We’ll make a composer out of you in no time!… The consciousness of the Jews was German in culture but Austrian and liberal in politics until the rise of Czech as well as German extreme nationalism, accompanied by anti-Semitism in the late l9th century, posed new choices and dilemmas.

SG. It is quite remarkable to see how in the case of Kafka’s generation the loyalties were already German, not Austrian…

S. Mahler said of himself that he was “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.” Kafka was younger, and a Jew in the important enclave of German Jewish intellectuals in Prague, who soon developed a subculture of their own, partly Zionist in the end. However, hey were operative now in another environment from the heady liberal environment in which Mahler was raised in Iglau in the l860’s. In Prague too, the Jews became a part of the elite of Prague, partners of the ruling German gentile liberals. They really were, the only thing they did not do was live in the same apartment houses if they were rich. Gary Cohen wrote a remarkably interesting book on the Germans of Prague (Jews were part of the Germans of Prague), and how when Czech nationalism comes (a little bit before 1848 and after) and builds up toward the great crisis of the l890’s, the Germans of Prague also begin to feel the pressure. As the liberal elite lost power, the German lower classes felt the pressure to become Czech because now all the local things – the bars, all the small services – were becoming Czech. And here we have the beginning of another political consciousness – the question of “are you with us or against us”? And the Jews too get forced into this position. And since especially the cultivated Jews of Prague are so deeply German in culture it was a special problem for them. They get a third allegiance – to the Jews. Some become proto-Zionists, or Zionists, especially after World War I. Kafka converts his triple cultural outsiderness into a literature of ontic despair. He can’t be fully a Jew, a Czech, or a German. Complete in none, alienated from each, he transcends all.

SG. My next question concerns the mind of the Modern. There is a general consensus that modern consciousness is first of all defined by how we refer to our past. Modern time defines itself against the past, presenting itself as a liminality. It strikes me that there seems to be a similarity here between our relationship to our past and the way in which the West defined itself against the Orient. I am explicitly referring to the work of Edward Said and his concept of Orientalism. Do you think that we can view modernism as a kind of internal Orientalism of the modern mind?

S. I like this! I have never struck this formulation and Said never does either as far as I know…I know his concept of Otherness, when your identity is defined by the Other (whom you put down). But I have never seen this applied to the way in which you relate to your past. I have some reservations, of course. First of all, the historical consciousness has progressed to such a strong degree that the past becomes differentiated, that each social group generates its own usable past. Let us take the Czech case: the Czechs generated a history, which was built around their separateness from the Germans. They tried to generate that history. They did it to some degree (as all histories are done) with invention. They invented a kind of Czech consciousness, which did not in fact exist at the time to which they attribute it…. You can attach to something in the past that reinforces your desires or values in the present…I will give you a German example: the mythology of the Teutoburg Forest and the mythology of Barbarossa. The first is built into a national democratic conception, the second into a strongly feudal one. You pick out something in the past and part of the past is “otherized,” but another part is assimilated as illustrious, heroic and epic inheritance. So you distinguish between pieces of the past.

SG. One can argue that this is what in part happens with the Orient, there is le sauvage noble, who gets romanticized and who is looked upon as something that the Western civilization conspicuously lacks, whereas parts of the “Orient” are completely “Otherized”.

S. There is also ironization that comes in. Actually, Edward Said has it himself in some measure. There are bad jokes…Voltaire is very good on this. He is a great example, he is always using Islam: these he presents as really civilized people, this is where you see human values, rationalism, at their highest. He knows pretty well that this is not the case. But he constructs them as a mirror of what Europeans ought to be…As for the past as otherness, my argument is that parts of the past are selected for as appropriate for assimilation to the present, while parts of it are rejected. Let us take another example in English history, which is full of this sort of things: you sort out the different parts of the heritage. This is true of the difference between the allegedly democratic, tribal Saxon heritage and the noble heritage of the Normans as they are used in l9th century historiography. Different sectors of the English political society in a given era will have different pieces to look to, in order to define themselves from the past.
Now, the total “Otherizing” of the past comes from something else. And in this case it’s not so much to make it subordinate, as you do with all these nationalities, classes, political systems. There is another kind of “Otherness”, which is “ancient” versus “modern.” Tout court. Then you have a battle between the ancients and the moderns. It’s a trope in European thought. And the moderns tend then to attach themselves very strongly to some characteristics, which in fact distinguish them from the past. And they take their pride from the present, and even from their aspiration to a new present, to the future. Pushing the future in as a third term in the determination of the relation between modernity and the past is a very good thing to do, it’s a very good way to make your checklist of whether this works or not. Take the case of the 20th century modernists in architecture all across Europe after World War I. They think architecture will be in a single international style, a universal tongue. This is something all humanity should speak, really, no particularity, please! Never mind national character, never mind national heritage, we are saying something completely new. Lessing was no different in the Enlightenment era. Lessing is telling you: these are the universal human values, these characteristics belong to enlightenment, regardless of specific cultures, Christian, Muslim or Jewish. Now, let us examine who has these and who hasn’t? And then he can begin playing a lot of games with history. Some of which are jokes on us, and some are contempt for the Other. But the key thing is the claim to universality. That can be connected with a claim for futurity, as Karl Marx did for the proletariat! He could put upon the proletariat as a universal class the enormous but glorious task of realizing the potential of the human species as a whole. And many of these universal characteristics are present in our contemporary value systems and deeply anchored in past religion and philosophy – moral judgments, conceptions of bliss, etc. He asks us to find in the present the social groups and ideas can become carriers to actualize the universals through the processes of history.

SG. This was a fascinating exposition that brought together the conflict between the ancient and the modern and the relation of this conflict to the claim to universality, inherent in the Enlightenment. My last question can be easily connected to this exposition for it concerns liberalism and liberal values. Do you think liberalism is the only political vehicle that is paired with modernity? What is the relation between modernity and liberalism?

S. Modernity of course has many faces, many features. Essentially, if you use the word in a holistic way, then you are going to have a historical model (I gave you at the beginning of our conversation such a model, characterized by the development and impact of the two great revolutions: the French and the Industrial Revolutions). It’s a historical model of modernity because it tells you that history is entering a new phase, but it does not break with all that went before. This is why modernism, the cultural component of modernity, despite its many facets, is a simpler term than modernity. The latter embraces many more fields of human existence and activity. Modernity mixes you up, obliges you to include in the consciousness residua from history that survive as part of the constitution of the present, of the modern. There are obvious places, where the salient feature of modernity in a given context is, let us say, economic but not political. This touches your question, about the relation between. liberalism and modernity. I simply cannot make the kind of necessary identification that is often made in the United States between free economy, i.e., market economy and democracy. It is not liberalism exactly, but when most Americans think democracy, what they think of is our parliamentary institutions and universal suffrage. Everybody knows – just go to Singapore, a nice dictatorial state, everybody is presumably happy, everybody is making a lot of money, even the Chinese manage under that dictatorship, despite all the prejudices against them. So far (and as far as I know) they don’t generate as much in the way of modernism (as a cultural phenomenon). Well, but what do I know? It may be a very productive society culturally but it doesn’t seem to be producing that kind of re-assessment or re-interpretation of life that you get in the arts, for example. That’s something else, of course, this critical element in the autonomization of the arts and the marginalization of artists and their separation from the structure of power, which is very strong in modern but freer societies. From my point of view modernism is connected with liberalism, because if we didn’t have liberalism, the artists couldn’t get away with it, i.e., with the radicalism of art, its critique of life and society. It doesn’t even need to be a critique of the political authority, it’s just saying: it stinks. In that sense, was liberalism necessary? Yes… As for the economy, political and intellectual liberalism was historically a major factor in the development of the capitalist and industrial economy in nineteenth century Europe. I cannot imagine that, if the prevailing privileges of the serf- and slave-owning classes in Russia and the United States had endured, if nobody had freed the serfs and the slaves, if nobody had done anything about it, “just let it be”, what form would our political economies taken then? Emancipation is certainly a prime case of the interaction of political liberalism and economics in shaping modernity… Retrospectively, we can all be wise and say liberalism was very necessary to modernization and to modernity. But does that mean that Singapore – or even China cannot make it on another basis? Communism has shown another road to modernity, in which some of its worst social aspects were overcome while some the highest contributions to human well-being that liberalism has brought were crushed out. This conversation, trying to establish general relations between modernity and modernism, between past and present, on a grand scale has inevitably led us to oversimplify the complex world we are trying to understand. Let’s encourage our readers to use a sharp critical lens in examining our record here!

SG. Professor Schorske let me thank you for this stimulating and broadly refreshing discussion of modernity and modernism.

S. You are very welcome. I am very sympathetic to the journal (even if I cannot read many materials here) and I am fascinated by what you are doing. Good luck.