This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siècle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. “Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein's native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems....This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful.”—New York Times Book Review.

In musical history, Hanslick has popularly come down as a bigoted reactionary who never could or would understand the magnificence of Wagner. Here for the first time in English one can get a corrected impression. The reader discovers that Hanslick far from being a reactionary was way ahead of his time; that his opinions and analyses for the most part are as valid and exciting today as they ever were; and that there is no music criticism more delightful to read for its learning, wit and authority.