How New Things Emerge, though. On the founding and on the early years of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna

Abstract

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (JAS), founded on the initiative of prominent Austrian emigrant social scientists in the USA in 1963 and financed in the early years by the Ford Foundation, was the first postgraduate institution in post-war Austria where new methods in sociology, political science and economics were taught and applied in research. The essay describes again the problems and the difficulties in establishing the Institute in the context of the political control exerted by the ruling coalition parties (ÖVP and SPÖ) in academe and the field of science as well against the fervent resistance of the University of Vienna which was dominated by a mixture of conservativism, clericalism and mediocrity. Based on further archival material and on the personal experience of the author who began his academic career in the IAS in the Sixties the analysis and the arguments put forward in this essay corroborate and partly expand the critical investigation of the founding years of the IAS published in the ÖZG two years ago by Christian Fleck (2000/1). In contrast to Christian Fleck, the author comes to a more positive evaluation of the innovative contribution the IAS has made to the development of a modern and critical social science in Austria.