Files
Abstract
This dissertation examines the intellectual and social history of the idea of progress as developed and debated in the project of Rudolf Broda (1880-1932), a Viennese social democrat and sociologist. Broda founded and coordinated a transnational network of scholars, politicians, and reformers on a spectrum of political inclinations, published periodicals in French, English, German, Russian, Hungarian, and Esperanto, and initiated a popular movement across and beyond Europe to research and organize social progress. This work is an intellectual biography of Broda’s and of the movement for global progress he built. It argues that his project had a unifying aim: brokering between civilizations it was to organize a holistic interpretation of pacifist social democracy across class, political party, and state boundaries by building an organic, synthetic world culture encompassing all the best aspects of individual ‘cultures’. This research maps and studies the network of involved persons, their social and intellectual milieux, the principal themes of their debates, and the forms of their political organizing. It traces the movement’s development from its beginnings through the First World War and studies how its understanding of society and of (possible) progress changed during the war as social democratic internationalism betrayed its own principles, Russia experienced two revolutions, empires started disintegrating and building a new world order became a real possibility. In sum, this dissertation shows how the idea of progress structured a large debate of the time’s key questions while imagining a more just future society.