Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is a well written and creative analysis of politics and culture. Schorske mostly analyzes politics through culture, or even more explicitly cultural characters. His analysis is creatively approached, smoothly written, enthusiastic, and at times poetic.

I believe my dissatisfaction with the work relates back to all of these otherwise ingenious characteristics. As a work of history, it fails. It provides an insufficient analysis of the times, politically, and culturally, by focusing on only a handful of individuals and movements. While these offer archetypal experiences of the times, the analysis fails to dig into the greater arena, beyond immediate causes (repeatedly stated to be caused by the declining liberal ideology and politics). Beyond this there are some structural issues, the chapters, in fact individual essays, overlap in a fashion that’s repetitive, and as has been noted in another review here, a little unfocused.

Schorske admits in his introduction that he is not an art historian or a literary critic, so his analysis of such things, the bulk of the work, is from done from the perspective of an historian. And this, most fundamentally, captures the nature of my problem. Analysis by an historian is not necessarily historical analysis.