Just what was the Habsburg monarchy? How was it to be defined, classified? While many legal scholars around the turn of the 20^th century regarded Austria as an archaic state, others advanced a more positive interpretation, using the language of sociology to critique the analytical distinction between “normal” nation-states and “abnormal” empires.

By the end of the 19^th century, the nation-state had come to be seen among historians, legal scholars, and political scientists as the “natural” form of political community. “Empire” emerged as a category of scientific analysis, and was used to describe states that did not correspond to the nation-state ideal, including the multiethnic Dual Monarchy. The rise of the nationalist conception of the state did not, however, go unchallenged. A critical contingent of intellectuals from the Monarchy’s geographic and social margins rejected the historicist paradigm on which notions of Austrian abnormality were based and began to formulate a unique sociological approach to the study of states, one that promised to rehabilitate “empire” as a form of government. Committed to preserving imperial diversity, these scholars forged global networks that sought to contest the pretensions of the nation-state, in the process laying the groundwork for a critique of social scientific Eurocentrism.

Thomas R. Prendergast is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European and Jewish History at Duke University and currently Fulbright/IFK_Junior Fellow.