The success of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) in the country’s September general election was widely anticipated, but a shock nonetheless – at least for centrists and progressives. With 29 per cent of the vote, for the first time the hard-right, anti-immigrant party topped the polls, beating the conservatives (OVP) into second place and leaving the Social Democrats, Greens and others trailing.

Despite its success, however, the FPO will not form Austria’s next government. After weeks of horse-trading with potential coalition partners, it failed to strike a deal, so the ball is now back in the court of those mainstream centrist and left-of-centre parties that trailed it in the ballot in September. But even if the hard right doesn’t take over the government this time round, there is a sense of inevitability about their ascent, considering that Austria seems to converge politically with its neighbour, Hungary. In addition, the German equivalent of the FPO, the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), also had its best ever result in last weekend’s German election.

In central Europe these developments, in particular the rise of the hard right, are particularly troubling. There are echoes of the bleakest period in the region’s history, the interwar years of the 20th Century, rattling the ghosts of Austria’s vengeful and murderous past. Fascism, anti-Semitism, and National Socialism (Nazism) were all, in part, minted in the Austria of that period. Austrians played an outsized role in the Holocaust, out of all proportion to their numbers.

There is a further parallel here with the interwar years; the gradual rightwards shift of the country is leaving the capital, Vienna, gradually more isolated, exactly as happened during that period. Just as today’s Social Democrats, led by the mayor Michael Ludwig, retain a healthy majority on the Vienna City Council, ostentatiously bucking the national trend, so the Vienna of 1919 to 1934 was led by a radical, pioneering Social Democratic council, surrounded by a country ruled at a federal level by conservative and pan-German coalition governments increasingly turning to outright Fascism.

Yet despite the national hostility, the red dot of socialist Vienna still transformed the capital and left a lasting legacy both in the city, and, even more strikingly, abroad. Their conservative opponents, namely the Catholic prelate and chancellor Ignaz Seipel, denigrated this period of socialist rule as ‘Red Vienna’. It wasn’t meant as a compliment, yet the label stuck, and became a rallying cry. It is exactly a century since Red Vienna was at its peak, the horizons of its politicians and administrators unbounded, a place of pilgrimage for progressives and socialists across the continent and beyond. What was Red Vienna trying to achieve, and what are its lessons for our own times?

Red Vienna was nothing if not ambitious. Its aims extended far beyond the usual aspirations of trade unionists and socialists to improve the material conditions of the industrial working class. With the defeat and break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War, together with the toppling of the Habsburg monarchy, Max Adler, one of the Social Democrats’ leading theoreticians, wrote of creating die neuen menschen, ‘new men’ for a post-imperial, democratic, republican era. Others spoke of a ‘revolution of souls’.

To achieve this, Red Vienna drew on all the latest techniques, methodologies and insights from the social sciences, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, statistics, mathematics and more. Fuelling the City Council’s belief that such a daunting task as a ‘revolution of souls’, as some put it, was even possible was the knowledge that Vienna itself had become the leading theoretical centre in many of these fields. The job of Vienna’s social democrats was thus to harness such theory to policy and practice.

In so doing, they crafted a modern, evidence-based politics founded on what they regarded as objective, measurable scientific research – ‘exact thinking’, to quote one contemporary Viennese mathematician and philosopher, for exacting times. The consequences of this novel approach were profound, and lingered long after Red Vienna itself was violently snuffed out by the Austro-Fascists in 1934, a prequel to the full-scale invasion of Austria by Hitler and the Nazis in March 1938, the Anschluss.

How did this praxis work? Vienna’s ‘golden age’ of the decades before the First World War is rightly memorialised as the glittering city of Mahler, Freud, Klimt, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler and Loos, an epicentre of creativity, innovation and decadence all in one, hurtling towards extinction. The fin-de-siècle caricature is just that, a caricature; but like all caricatures, it contains more than a grain of truth. The image has certainly dominated the popular perception of the city ever since. However, it was the successor generation, of Red Vienna, that captured the profound intellectual advances of the fin-de-siècle city for the practical and rather more earnest purpose of transforming society.

Take psychoanalysis. Left to Freud himself and the grand old men of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, the new discipline might have just stayed on the couch, the preserve of a few analysts and their wealthy clients. But in the hands of the so-called ‘second generation’ of psychoanalysts, the field’s basic principles were extended into all areas of medical provision, and even what they began to call ‘social work’. As much as Freud himself, his great Viennese rival Alfred Adler was their inspiration. Whereas Freud believed that neurosis was fundamentally and exclusively linked to sexuality, Adler argued that people were also heavily influenced by wider society. He was thus installed as the central guru of Red Vienna, and his acolytes set about frantically applying his principles to the health system of the city, to improve mental health in general and to banish the scourge of sexual disease in particular, which was rife at the time.

A new clinic, the Ambulatorium, was opened to offer free psychotherapy. One young analyst in particular, Wilhelm Reich, set up free ‘Sex-Hygiene Clinics for Workers and Employees’, driving into working-class districts to dole out sex-education pamphlets and contraceptives door-to-door. Equally, Freud’s own daughter, Anna, was instrumental in extending the insights gained from her father’s work to young children, setting up an experimental nursery (mostly for kids from poorer families) to observe, record and thus improve their early development.

The nursery was paid for, and named after, Anna’s collaborator Edith Jackson. Fortunately, they were able to escape to Britain just after the Anschluss, accompanying Sigmund Freud to London, where they set up the celebrated Hampstead War Nursery. Here Anna and other Viennese refugees first studied child-parent bonding in a methodical manner, pioneering, together with John Bowlby, what later became known as ‘attachment theory’. Their work radically reformed visiting hours at hospitals in Britain and the West, allowing mothers to spend time with their children on wards – a very good example of the practical application of theory to real life.

Equally, another Viennese socialist, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, applied the teachings of Franz Ciszek to children, to create what later became known as ‘art therapy’. Cizek, a professor at the School of Applied Art in Vienna during the Golden Age, was the first to turn art on its head for youngsters. Rather than using it as a medium to push children into the adult world, through dull imitative drawing and the often pedantic discipline of art historical research, Cizek explored line and colour to encourage playfulness and creativity. Only a child, he argued, could show adults ‘revelations of elemental creative power.’ Dicker-Brandeis taught these methods with children in Vienna, to improve their emotional development. She famously used her secret classes at the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to make the boys and girls there as emotionally secure as she could amid the trauma, starvation and horror all around them. Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, but she managed to preserve about 5,000 of her children’s drawings. These constitute one of the most important and searing witness accounts of the Holocaust.

Or take architecture. If Reich, Anna Freud and their peers concentrated on the psychological health of the new human being, a fresh generation of architects and planners focused on the built environment. Convinced that high quality, light and well-ventilated housing could help transform health outcomes, Red Vienna embarked on a bold programme of ‘social housing’, largely funded by new taxes on middle-class goods and property. The vast Gemeindebauten (roughly translated as ‘community buildings’) that were erected after 1924 remain the most obvious legacy of Vienna’s Social Democrats.

Altogether, 25,000 new apartments were built. Most of them are still lived in. What has been described as ‘the central monument to Red Vienna’ was the colossal Karl-Marx-Hof, by some accounts still the longest single inhabited building in Europe (if not the world). This incorporated laundries, pharmacies, schools, and maternity clinics. To save space, and time for socialism’s ‘New Woman’, the young architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky invented the fitted kitchen, which could be mass-produced for the new estates. In very typical fashion for Red Vienna, she arrived at the new design by applying the latest time-and-motion studies devised by the American Frederick Winslow Taylor to the domestic interior. More famous for its application to Ford production lines, Taylorism arguably had still more of an impact in the kitchen. Ms Schutte-Lihotsky’s ideas were taken up by Frankfurt’s socialist council too in the 1920s, hence her creation was better known as the ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’.

To this day, about 60 per cent of Vienna’s population of just under 2 million live in social housing, the highest proportion of any city in Europe. Vienna is regularly voted the world’s most liveable city: cheap housing, for one, means more money for the good life. Just 44 per cent of Viennese spend over a quarter of their income on housing (including energy costs); in London it is 86 per cent, in Paris 67 per cent. Other facets of Red Vienna, such as good public transport, are also cherished by today’s City Council.

These are some of the practical legacies of Red Vienna. The city hosts many visits from foreign, often American, city officials and politicians eager to learn more about the city’s social housing, marking out Vienna today as much as it did in 1924. But it is the praxis of Red Vienna, the application of scientific methodology to the all-round improvement of human welfare, that remains just as important. Not for nothing was interwar Vienna also the centre of the new school of philosophy that became known as ‘logical positivism’. Several members of the ‘Vienna Circle’ of philosophers who refined this new philosophy were intimately connected to Red Vienna; they were merely applying the same scientific rigour to language, truth and logic as their comrades on the City Council were to housing, health, sport and culture.

The manifesto of the Vienna Circle, published as a slim pamphlet in 1929, was called ‘The Scientific World Conception’. In that same year, an address by Hans Hahn, a member of the Circle, professed the group’s ‘faith in the methods of the exact sciences…faith in the careful logical inferences (as opposed to bold flights of ideas, mystical intuition, and emotive comprehension), faith in the patient observation of phenomena (as opposed to the poetic, imaginative attempt to grasp wholes and complexes).’ That’s as good a description as any of what Red Vienna was trying to do more generally.

The most socialist member of the Vienna Circle, and closest to the City Council, was Otto Neurath. Applying the latest techniques of graphic art to the didactic demands of Red Vienna, he and colleagues invented an entirely new visual language, called Isotypes, to show and explain the work of the council to its working-class, often illiterate, voters. His primary innovation was breathtakingly simple – to show quantity by repetition, not enlargement. As he put it: ‘A sign is representative of a certain amount of things; a greater number of signs is representative of a greater amount of things.’

By deploying data and statistics in an easy and accessible manner, Neurath argued that he was inventing a new ‘universal language’. Who can gainsay him? Neurath’s work was the genesis of today’s omnipresent infographics, originating in Neurath’s own constructive application of the ‘Scientific World Conception’ to human welfare. The so-called ‘Vienna Method’ of visual display (or ‘pictographs’ as they were often called at the time) was quickly taken up by institutions in the United States, and was used very effectively in educating people about the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis. The burly, exuberant Neurath caused a stir when he visited America for the first time in 1933. ‘The Big Man who created the Little Man is with us’, proclaimed one magazine.

Mercifully, many of Vienna’s interwar intellectuals, philosophers and scientists escaped the Nazis and settled in America, Britain and other countries, where they carried on applying the scientific method to a bewildering range of fields in their adopted homelands. To take just a few examples. Paul Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog were largely responsible for developing statistical sociology and consumer research in America. Together with Ernst Dichter, they introduced what became known as the ‘Vienna School of motivation research’ to the nascent advertising industry, thereby transforming it. Herzog, in particular, was mainly associated with the inventions of the ‘focus group’ technique of market research, first pioneered in Vienna in the 1920s. Herzog also introduced other scientific techniques such as the ‘eye camera’, to record pupil dilations in response to visual materials. For a long time the modest, the under-studied Herzog was the most powerful woman on Madison Avenue.

At a more elevated level, the free-market economists of the ‘Austrian School’ (such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Machlup and Gottfried Haberler) were extremely influential in the development of monetary theory and trade theory, as well as the study of business cycles. They also championed the role of the entrepreneur as the main creator of wealth in a free society; another Viennese economist, Joseph Schumpeter, rediscovered the crucial importance of the entrepreneur for the 20^th Century in his famous book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1944. Here, Schumpeter described the central process driving the capitalist system onwards as one of ‘creative destruction’.

The leader of the ‘Austrian School’ was the irascible Mises. Every other week during the years of Red Vienna his pick of economists and a few others gathered in his large office at the ‘Lower Austria Chamber of Commerce and Industry’ to hear papers, followed by over three hours of often heated argument before adjourning for dinner. United by a belief in the efficacy of economic liberalism, they were hostile, in varying degrees, to the sort of economic planning and social engineering practised by the politicians of Red Vienna. But all members of the ‘Mises seminar’ were also very much in sympathy with the more general vision of their Viennese peers, of applying the theoretical advances in economics to the real-world, day-to-day activity of a working economy.

As chief economist at the Chamber of Commerce this was Mises’s day job, after all. Mises never held a full post at the University of Vienna, possibly due to the pervasive anti-Semitism among the higher echelons of the institution. Thus, as the historian Quinn Slobodian writes, his protégés in the ‘Austrian School’ became accustomed to ‘actually getting involved in practical activity – the application of economic knowledge – getting their hands dirty in advising business, drawing up charts and gathering statistics.’

Hayek left Vienna to take up an appointment as a professor at the London School of Economics in 1931. As Fascism closed in on Vienna, so his colleagues gradually left too, or were forced out. Most ended up at American Universities; Hayek himself left the LSE for the University of Chicago in 1950, where he joined the economist Milton Friedman. It was abroad that the ‘Austrian School’ exerted its greatest influence, expertly marshalled by Hayek, who in 1944 published his most famous text, The Road to Serfdom. He founded the ‘Mont Pelerin Society’ in 1947 (the hotel in which they first met was located on this Swiss mountain), a loose constellation of economic liberals from, mainly, Britain, America (including the Austrian exiles and emigrants) and Germany. Collectively, they led the intellectual fightback against Socialism and Keynesianism from the 1950s onwards.

Members of the MPS had a dramatic impact on turning the tide of political thinking into the 1970s. Many early Thatcherites and Reaganites attended their meetings, and soaked up the literature churned out by MPS affiliated think-tanks such as Britain’s free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in 1955 on the direct inspiration of Hayek. Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s intellectual guru, followed the work of the IEA closely as did other early Thatcherites such as Geoffrey Howe and John Biffen. Thatcher herself became a great admirer of Hayek, recommending him for the award of Companion of Honour in 1984.

It was very much the same story in America. Washington’s right-wing, free-market think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, were founded at roughly the same pace as their British equivalents, and also owed much of their intellectual inspiration to the Austrian School. Equally, Mises, from his new perch at New York University, tried to recreate his Vienna seminar. It never achieved the same buzz as it had had in Vienna, but Mises still exerted a formative influence on intellectuals and politicians from the libertarian right of American politics, such as Murray Rothbard and Ronald Paul.

That the West still cleaves, however falteringly, to a paradigm of evidence-led policy-making thus owes much to the scions of Red Vienna. One hundred years on, it is a legacy to celebrate anew. These were the very conditions that enabled the creativity and legacy of Red Vienna, of which the scientific world view is but one important consequence. They cannot be allowed to be lost again, least of all in central Europe.