[W]e might be tempted to characterize the new attitude as neo-romanticism or neo-mysticism. This formulation has considerable plausibility. Unquestionably the turn toward the subjective that we find in so much of the imaginative and speculative writing of the quarter century between 1890 and the First World War recalls the aspirations of the original Romanticists. . . . It was writers such as these who established the cult of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche as the literary heralds of the new era. There is a pathetic paradox in the fact that the year of Nietzsche's madness--1889--coincides with the time at which his work, after two decades of public neglect, first began to find wide acceptance. . . .

Yet to call Nietzsche a neo-romantic is surely misleading. . . .

If not "romanticism," will "irrationalism" serve as a general description? . . . Unquestionably the major intellectual innovators of the 1890s were profoundly interested in the problem of irrational motivation in human conduct. They were obsessed, almost intoxicated, with a rediscovery of the nonlogical, the uncivilized, the inexplicable. But to call them "irrationalists" is to fall into a dangerous ambiguity. It suggests a tolerance or even a preference for the realms of the unconscious. The reverse was actually the case. The social thinkers of the 1890s were concerned with the irrational only to exorcise it. . . .

As a substitute, the formula "anti-intellectualist" has sometimes been employed. This characterization is both flexible and comprehensive. It suggests the revulsion from ideology and the a priori, from the abstract thought of the century and a half preceding. . . .

Yet it is at the same time too broad and too narrow. . . . It suggests . . . that the turn from the principles of the Enlightenment was more complete and decisive than was actually the case. The main attack against the intellectual heritage of the past was in fact on a narrower front. It was directed primarily against what the writers of the 1890s chose to call "positivism." By this they did not mean simply the . . . doctrines associated with the name of Auguste Comte, who had originally coined the term. Nor did they mean the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer, which was the guise in which positivist thinking was most apparent in their own time. They used the word in a looser sense to characterize the whole tendency to discuss human behavior in terms of analogies drawn from natural science. In reacting against it, the innovators of the 1890s felt that they were rejecting the most pervasive intellectual tenet of their time. They believed that they were casting off a spiritual yoke that the preceding quarter-century had laid upon them.

With Darwinism in its applied or "social" form, we come to the central point of the intellectual conflict. Some of Darwin's earliest supporters had been followers of Auguste Comte, and the second of the high priests of positivism, Herbert Spencer, had early rallied to Darwinism, sensing its possibilities as support for his own position. With its Darwinian alliance, the positivist way of thinking underwent some curious changes. In its original eighteenth-century or Utilitarian form it had been an intellectualist philosophy, basing itself on the conviction that the problems of man in society were readily capable of rational solution. Under the influence of Social Darwinism, however, the positivist creed began to shed its rationalist features: "heredity" and "environment" replaced conscious, logical choice as the main determinants of human action. . . . The result was a kind of scientific fatalism--the antithesis of the buoyantly optimistic attitude that had characterized the philosophers of the eighteenth century or the English utilitarians of the first part of the following. The ultimate irony of positivism was that what had started as an ultra-intellectualist doctrine became in effect a philosophy of radical anti-intellectualism.

Hence in the perspective of a cultural scene dominated by Social Darwinism, the young thinkers of the 1890s can be regarded as aiming at precisely the opposite of what they have usually been accused of doing. Far from being "irrationalists," they were striving to vindicate the rights of rational inquiry. Alarmed by the threat of an iron determinism, they were seeking to restore the freely speculating mind to the dignity it had enjoyed a century earlier.

With the new decade [of the 1890s], particularly with its closing years, the circumstances, social and political, that had earlier inspired a sense of sober confidence began to change. Both on the "lower" and on the "higher" levels of intellectual activity, doubts arose as to the reigning philosophy of the upper middle class--the self-satisfied cult of material progress which, in a vulgarized sense, could also be termed "positivism." After two decades of precarious equilibrium, the institutional arrangements of the major Western European states were again brought into question. The artificial, contrived character of the regimes with which unification had endowed Germany and Italy were revealed by their malfunctioning--in the one case by the erratic changes in policy that followed the resignation of Bismarck in 1890, in the other by the social disorders and authoritarian government with which the century came to a close. In France the shock of the Dreyfus case acted as a stimulus to the re-examination of the traditional ideologies on which both the defenders and the enemies of the accused captain had rested their case.

Social disorder, economic crisis, and institutional malfunctioning had contributed to the growth of Socialist parties and to the spread of Marxist doctrines. The decade of the 1890s was to be the great period of expansion in the history of European Socialism. At first sight it might seem that Marxism--a critical as opposed to a positive philosophy of society--could have offered to the intellectual innovators of the 1890s a suitable weapon with which to combat the dominant ideology of the European middle class. Such was, indeed, briefly the case in Italy, under the revivifying influence of the lectures of Antonio Labriola at the University of Rome. But even here Labriola's student [Benedetto] Croce was eventually impelled to arrive at his own critique of Marxist doctrine. Basically Marxism was to figure in the intellectual renovation of the 1890s as an aberrant, and peculiarly insidious, form of the reigning cult of positivism. It loomed on the cultural horizon as the last and most ambitious of the abstract and pseudoscientific ideologies that had bewitched European intellectuals since the early eighteenth century.

To come to terms with Marxism, then, was the first and most obvious task confronting the intellectual innovators of the 1890s. Some, like Freud, dealt with Marx only by implication--by extending social thought to new areas undreamed of in the socialist ideologies. Others, like Pareto, offered highly skeptical refutations of the central arguments of dialectical materialism. Still others, like Croce and Sorel, while maintaining the Marxist terminology, were to transmute it into something so different from the original intention as to leave little standing but a hollow framework--within which the earlier categories of thought had ceased to be actualities and had become mere symbols and methodological conveniences. Finally, a decade later than the rest, Max Weber was to propose a view of society that brought Marx's economic motivations into a tense and polar relationship to the deepest spiritual values of mankind.

This whole task of cultural re-evaluation, while concerned with common problems, had a different tone and character in each of the major national communities of Western and Central Europe. . . . Despite the fact that its finest days of intellectual leadership were over--the great century of creation from about 1760 to 1860 had now begun to slip into idealizing memory--Germany still held an almost unquestioned position of pre-eminence. France might be the nation par excellence of artists and novelists, but Germany was the land of thinkers and professors. . . .

[As Meinecke wrote of the period]: "In all Germany . . . one can detect something new around 1890 not only politically but spiritually and intellectually. . . . [A] new and deeper longing for what was genuine and true . . . [and] a new sense for the fragmentary and problematic character of modern life". . . .

From 1890 to 1914 . . . we can detect in Germany two complementary and [yet] contradictory processes--a cultural revival and the beginnings of a "secession of the intellectuals." The tension between the two was to give a character of painful self-searching to German intellectual life in . . . [this] quarter-century.

In the case of the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, . . . [his] concern with the sexual and psychopathic has not infrequently been ascribed to the character of life in the Vienna of his day. This character was presumably embodied in the combination of charm and erotic "decadence" that we find in the theater of Arthur Schnitzler. . . . Rather than being an intellectual in the conventional sense, [however,] Freud was a medical man and an inordinately hard-working one. It was only in the latter part of his life that he formed friendships with such leading novelists as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland, and Arnold Zweig. Earlier his personal associations had been almost exclusively with physicians like himself--most of them Jewish--or with members of the Jewish lodge to which he belonged. His patients, furthermore, were not altogether typical of Viennese society: a large number of them were foreigners from Eastern Europe.

The disabilities under which Freud labored as a Jew, and more particularly the official prejudice that delayed for years his appointment to a professorship at the University, further suggest . . . the least attractive features of the Vienna of his day. The antagonism among nationalities and classes characteristic of the last decades of the Austrian empire reached its sharpest form in the popular anti-Semitism of the Vienna streets: the city of Freud's maturity was also the Vienna of Hitler's youth. Hence we can understand the former's dislike of his home city and his contant longing to escape to the more liberal atmosphere of England--a wish that was to be granted under tragic circumstances one year before his death.

When we look at French intellectual life . . .we can scarcely fail to be struck . . . [by the relative] centralization of cultural activities, and the comparatively favorable attitude of . . . intellectuals towards their own national government. . . .

When in the late 1890s, in the tumults of the Dreyfus case, the very existence of the Republic seemed threatened . . . [French] intellectuals were almost evenly divided. But the anti-Dreyfus writers were in general those of lesser rank--novelists like Barrès and Bourget whose reputations have not stood the passage of time, and the more conventional sort of university professors. The great and sensitive minds in the field of social thought were without exception Dreyfusards.

It is . . . relevant to recall that what gave the affaire its particular vehemence was the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to imagine a Dreyfus case in the Germany of the same period. In the first place, no German Jew had the remotest chance of becoming, like Dreyfus in France, a member of the Army General Staff. Beyond this, the attitude toward the Jews of liberal-minded German intellectuals was more ambiguous than that of their French counterparts: men like Weber and Meinecke opposed the conventional anti-Semitism of the German upper classes, but they qualified their opposition in a fashion that in France would have been quite unacceptable. In the country of Voltaire, an attitude of doctrinaire "enlightenment" was the rule rather than the exception. At Normale, a former student recalled: "We have always lived with our Jewish comrades in the same intimacy as with those who were Christians; it did not enter our heads that they could be different from us; and the idea that a man should have to suffer for his religion and his race seemed intolerable to us". . . .

[The Jewish intellectuals] Bergson and Durkheim [both] received major teaching chairs at Paris. Yet they were at the two extreme poles of intuitionism and residual positivism in the intellectual critique of the 1890s. Their careers suggest the extent of divergence within one or two commonly held assumptions that characterized not only the French Jews but French intellectual life as a whole [at the beginning of the twentieth century]. . . .

The Republic, then, was not only unacceptable [to French intellectuals]. On occasion it even seemed worth defending with some vehemence. And this was particularly true of the Jews, to whom the word "equality" in the national motto meant something more than an empty symbol. For them republican patriotism was a natural product of profound gratitude: the accusers of Captain Dreyfus committed a catastrophic error in imagining that he could possibly betray his country. . . .

We should bear . . . in mind . . . the near unanimity with which the normaliens aligned themselves behind Captain Dreyfus. . . .

The sequel, however, was to be less attractive. The triumph of the Dreyfusards was their undoing. With the exploitation of the victory of the Republican Left, a growing disillusionment gripped the consciences of the intellectuals--now entering middle age. . . . And at the same time the conservatives who had lost the ideological battle began to find new . . . grounds from which to make their appeal to traditional values. . . .

Against this background . . . [of] the major ideas that . . . started in the 1890s . . . [m]ost basic,...and the key to all the others was the new interest in the problem of consciousness and the role of the unconscious. . . .

Closely related to the problem of consciousness was the question of the meaning of time and duration in psychology, philosophy, literature, and history. It was the . . . effort to define the nature of subjective existence as opposed to the schematic order that the natural sciences had imposed on the external world. . . .

Beyond and embracing the questions of consciousness and time, there loomed the further problem of the nature of knowledge in what Wilhelm Dilthey had called the "sciences of the mind". . . . One had . . . a choice between the exercise of the sympathetic intuition posited in Croce's neo-idealistic theory of history, and the creation of useful fictions, as Max Weber was later to elaborate them, as models for critical understanding.

If the knowledge of human affairs, then, rested on such tentative foundations, the whole basis of political discussion had been radically altered. No longer could one remain content with the easy assurances of the rationalistic ideologies inherited from the century and a half preceding--liberal, democratic, or socialist as the case may be. The task was rather to penetrate behind the fictions of political action. . . .