 In the 'Introduction' the author claims that the text was born from his desire 'to construct a course in European intellectual history, designed to help students to understand the large, architectonic correlations between high culture and socio-political change' (p. XVIII).In his view, Vienna was a peculiar cultural environment due to the late ascendancy and early crisis of its liberal middle class between the 1860s and the 1890s.This compression of the socio-political liberal hegemony provided the opportunity for a 'collective Oedipal revolt' against the liberal inheritance, promoted by "Die Jungen" (the Young Ones), spreading from politics in the 1870s to literature and art in the 1890s.