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Papers by Thomas Prendergast

East European Jewish Affairs, 2020

Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness ... more Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness and the “new Jewish politics” of the period 1881–1917. They have largely neglected, however, the many popular Yiddish-language histories that appeared during this time. These popular histories – nearly all of them printed in Warsaw and dedicated to the topic of “world history” – were sold in the first decade of the twentieth century by newly established Yiddish publishing houses and were heavily advertised in the burgeoning Yiddish daily press. I argue that the narratives of cultural work presented in this genre of history provided a conceptual infrastructure for the eventual articulation of a Jewish mass politics in the post-1905 era. Moving beyond the textual analysis of canonical (Russian and Hebrew-language) historical literature reveals the discourses and practices that enabled Yiddish-speakers in the rapidly urbanizing Pale to imagine the Jewish nation as a coherent historical agent.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2020

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive sta... more If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria's often ethnolinguistical... more To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria's often ethnolinguistically heterogeneous borderlands contribute to the formation, institutionalization and diffusion of emerging social scientific discourses during the final decades of the 19th century? Investigating the intellectual exchange between two early proponents of folklore studies (Volkskunde)-the Slavonian-German-Jewish Friedrich Salomon Krauss (1859Krauss ( -1938 and Bukovinian-German Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1866-1930)-this paper argues that imperial peripheries, while traditionally overlooked as sites of knowledge production, in fact played a pivotal role in the development of an important brand of "progressive" social scientific research, one defined by a critical stance toward the prevailing historicist paradigms of the time. These self-described "social democrats of scholarship" collaborated, both formally and informally, on a number of related theoretical projects aimed at disrupting the exclusionary narratives of the academic establishment and re-focusing scholarly attention on the sociological, rather than historical, character of ethnonational difference. In this way, the nationalities question spurred, both in the center and at the margins of the monarchy, the development of new sciences of nationality intended to sustain Austria's imperial structure.

Book Reviews by Thomas Prendergast

Austrian History Yearbook, 2019

The authors foreground "culture" as a powerful instrument for shaping space. By "culture" they do... more The authors foreground "culture" as a powerful instrument for shaping space. By "culture" they do not mean high culture exclusively but also popular cultural forms (see the essays on the pop band Laibach in former Yugoslavia or the chapter on "Kitchen Stories"). Yet even these "lower" cultural forms are relatively high. These are all essays about modernist journals, avant-garde or classical music performances, and literature written by cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals. The transnational universe they sketch belongs firmly to the educated middle and upper classes. This leaves us with a rather narrow definition of culture, for it remains unclear how relevant cultural exchanges and connections between highly educated individuals were to the societies in which they were embedded. Was transnationalism in Central Europe limited to a stratum of cosmopolitan intellectuals? Or were other forms of transcultural exchange perhaps more significant? The volume does not delve into these questions.

East European Jewish Affairs, 2020

Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness ... more Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness and the “new Jewish politics” of the period 1881–1917. They have largely neglected, however, the many popular Yiddish-language histories that appeared during this time. These popular histories – nearly all of them printed in Warsaw and dedicated to the topic of “world history” – were sold in the first decade of the twentieth century by newly established Yiddish publishing houses and were heavily advertised in the burgeoning Yiddish daily press. I argue that the narratives of cultural work presented in this genre of history provided a conceptual infrastructure for the eventual articulation of a Jewish mass politics in the post-1905 era. Moving beyond the textual analysis of canonical (Russian and Hebrew-language) historical literature reveals the discourses and practices that enabled Yiddish-speakers in the rapidly urbanizing Pale to imagine the Jewish nation as a coherent historical agent.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2020

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive sta... more If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria's often ethnolinguistical... more To what extent and in what ways did the intellectual climate of Austria's often ethnolinguistically heterogeneous borderlands contribute to the formation, institutionalization and diffusion of emerging social scientific discourses during the final decades of the 19th century? Investigating the intellectual exchange between two early proponents of folklore studies (Volkskunde)-the Slavonian-German-Jewish Friedrich Salomon Krauss (1859Krauss ( -1938 and Bukovinian-German Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1866-1930)-this paper argues that imperial peripheries, while traditionally overlooked as sites of knowledge production, in fact played a pivotal role in the development of an important brand of "progressive" social scientific research, one defined by a critical stance toward the prevailing historicist paradigms of the time. These self-described "social democrats of scholarship" collaborated, both formally and informally, on a number of related theoretical projects aimed at disrupting the exclusionary narratives of the academic establishment and re-focusing scholarly attention on the sociological, rather than historical, character of ethnonational difference. In this way, the nationalities question spurred, both in the center and at the margins of the monarchy, the development of new sciences of nationality intended to sustain Austria's imperial structure.

Austrian History Yearbook, 2019

The authors foreground "culture" as a powerful instrument for shaping space. By "culture" they do... more The authors foreground "culture" as a powerful instrument for shaping space. By "culture" they do not mean high culture exclusively but also popular cultural forms (see the essays on the pop band Laibach in former Yugoslavia or the chapter on "Kitchen Stories"). Yet even these "lower" cultural forms are relatively high. These are all essays about modernist journals, avant-garde or classical music performances, and literature written by cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals. The transnational universe they sketch belongs firmly to the educated middle and upper classes. This leaves us with a rather narrow definition of culture, for it remains unclear how relevant cultural exchanges and connections between highly educated individuals were to the societies in which they were embedded. Was transnationalism in Central Europe limited to a stratum of cosmopolitan intellectuals? Or were other forms of transcultural exchange perhaps more significant? The volume does not delve into these questions.