Neoliberalism, consumer advertising, the shopping mall, infographics, the fitted kitchen, attachment theory, the distinct style of Californian modernist architecture, the focus group, the uninhibited orgasm.
Despite the location of a few world-class research institutes in Vienna, these days few would consider it a locus of leading edge social, scientific or political innovation on a par with London, Palo Alto or New York. And yet, Cockett argues, historically Vienna has had a myriad, outsized influence on the world. It first struck him as a journalist for the Economist. It is a gloriously quixotic enterprise: part collective biography, part intellectual genealogy, part urban history.
Sometimes the book feels as if it is careering off in too many directions at once: the origins of Bluetooth technology ascribed to the film actor Hedy Lamarr , the history of eugenics, the Sex-Pol movement, the recruitment of the Cambridge Five. And, in a sense, the sheer range of subjects covered makes his point. The Viennese were everywhere. Many names in the book are likely to be familiar to readers with a passing acquaintance with twentieth-century European intellectual history: Freud, Hayek, Popper, to name a few.
Others less so. It is no surprise that many of these belonged to women, often working in what were then relatively new fields of research or business, where traditional misogyny was less engrained β design, psychology, physics β but whose contributions tended to be obscured, then and after.
The biographies are as fascinating as they are wide-ranging. The remarkable Hedy Lamarr was one, but there are many others. Margarethe Lihotzky invented the fitted kitchen. Herta Herzog, Viennese developer of the focus group, was once considered the most powerful woman on Madison Avenue, the heart of the American advertising industry.
