The 1920s Viennese Intellectual Community as a Center for Ideas Exchange: A Network Analysis

Abstract

This article constructs a social network, based on informal seminar attendance, for intellectuals living and working in Vienna in the 1920s. A range of primary and secondary sources has been used to compile a dataset on the duration, operation, and membership of informal seminars and the movement of individuals through the Viennese intellectual community between 1918 and 1930. This has then been visualized as a social network, highlighting the interrelationships between individuals, seminars, and different fields of study in Vienna in this period. By linking the structure of social relationships to differences in ideas between individuals and groups, this technique complements the qualitative techniques that are traditionally used to analyze communities in the history of economic thought. It is argued that the nature of this intellectual community meant that scholars could easily move between different disciplines and that certain individuals assisted this process by acting as intermediaries between domains of knowledge.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.