[4] January 30 - The local and the national in Habsburg scientific institutions
Section outline
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While the old political vision of "unity in diversity" failed in the Habsburg lands (with those failures giving rise to a vast historiography), the role of the natural sciences in local, national, and imperial dynamics has only become an object of sophisticated investigation comparatively recently. "The gathering of men of science from all lands of the empire, the striving toward common goals pursued along one among many diverse lines of research shows us an apt reflection of the unity of the great state to which we are proud to belong," proclaimed one German-speaking Austrian scientist in the 1850s. Yet many Austrian scientists were invested in something other than imperial unity, and we discuss recent work on the scale of their research and the mobility of their careers in order to see how the "expanding circles of scientific life" could mediate between Staatsnation and Kulturnation agendas.
Assigned reading:
"Toward an appreciation of intellectual life in Austria," Allgemeine Zeitung (July 6, 1860), Beilage zu Nr. 188 edition. [Original German text]
Deborah R. Coen, "The power of local differences," Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018), 170-204.
German options: “Das Fest der Naturforscher in Wien,” Zeitung für die elegante Welt (October 19, 1832).
Justus von Liebig, “Die Zustand der Chemie in Oestreich,” Annalen der Pharmacie 25, no. 1 (1838): 339–47.Joseph Hyrtl, “Einst und Jetzt der Naturwissenschaft in Österreich,” in Amtlicher Bericht über die zwei und dreissigste Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte zu Wien im September 1856, edited by Joseph Hyrtl and Anton Schrötter (1858), 22-28.Polish option: Józef Dietl, “O instytucyi Docentów w ogóle, a szczególnie w Universytecie Jagiellońskim,” Czas (October 31, 1861).Hungarian option: “A tudomány támogatása,” Az ujság (March 10, 1911).If there is the right combination of interest and linguistic expertise, we could discuss J. E. Purkyně's Austria Polyglotta (1867), available in Czech and German versions.Suggested reading:
Tatjana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, “Science, Medicine and Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 679–86.Mitchell G. Ash, “The Natural Sciences in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: Institutions, Networks, Practices,” in The Global and the Local: The History of Science and the Cultural Integration of Europe, edited by Michał Kokowski (2006), 380–83.Mitchell G. Ash and Jan Surman, eds., The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848-1918 (2012). (See their introduction.)Jan Surman, “The Circulation of Scientific Knowledge in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: Multicultural Perspectives on Imperial Scholarship,” Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 163–82.Török Borbála Zsuzsanna, Exploring Transylvania: Geographies of Knowledge and Entangled Histories in a Multiethnic Province, 1790-1918 (2016).Johannes Feichtinger, "'Staatsnation', 'Kulturnation', 'Nationalstaat': The role of national politics in the advancement of science and scholarship in Austria from 1848 to 1938," in Ash and Surman, Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge, 57-82.David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (2003).
Marianne Klemun, "National 'consensus' as culture and practice: The Geological Survey in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire (1849-1867)," in Ash and Surman, Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge, 83-101.Wolfgang L. Reiter, Aufbruch und Zerstörung: Zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften in Österreich 1850 bis 1950 (2017).Lewis Pyenson, “An End to National Science: The Meaning and the Extension of Local Knowledge,” History of Science 40 (2002): 251–90. -