715786

research-article2017
JCS0010.1177/1468795X17715786Journal of Classical SociologyIsenberg

Article
Journal of Classical Sociology

A modern calamity – Robert

2018, Vol. 18(1) 55­–75
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1468795X17715786
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X17715786
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Bo Isenberg
Lund University, Sweden

Abstract
The writings of the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil provide sociology with vital
problems and reflections. Indeed, Musil introduces discussions that extend conventional
understanding of modernity – sociology’s general object of analysis. The article focuses on two
major sets of questions in Musil’s work: the shapelessness of man and the relation between
reason and sentiments. Both problems are essential in that genuine twentieth-century experience
which Musil calls functional stupidity: the functionalisation of the mind to collective demands of
the party, the race and the nation. The article discusses Musil’s arguments by relating them to
central propositions in classical sociology (Simmel, Weber, Kracauer, Tönnies, Park). Classical
sociology, in turn, is defined as a sub-discourse of classical modern reflection.

Keywords
Classical sociology, contingency, human shapelessness, modernity, Musil, stupidity,
totalitarianism

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses, it can move in all
directions and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance
and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Robert Musil

In one of his sociologically significant excursions into the history of ideas, Hans
Blumenberg (1987) summarises the experience of modernity in the notion of a ‘culture of
contingency’: modernity is an epoch in which nothing is essentially necessary and every-
thing could have been otherwise (p. 57). Niklas Luhmann, in turn, writes that modernity
‘formulates’ its own ‘proper values’ in ‘the modal form of contingency’ (1992: 47, cf.

Corresponding author:
Bo Isenberg, Department of Sociology, Lund University, PO Box 114, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden.
Email: bo.isenberg@soc.lu.se
56 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

93–128); as such, it relates to the world as something that is ‘neither necessary nor impos-
sible’ (1984: 152).1 Accordingly, any understanding of modernity, whether as culture,
society, mentality or a type of action, must acknowledge contingency and ambiguity.
Moreover, understanding must reflect these characteristics, which are the prerequisites of
knowledge of and in modern society. Theory, epistemology and ontology must not and
cannot be entirely separated.
No other discourse on modernity has come to manifest this fate more than sociology
– willingly or not. From the beginning, sociology aspired to become the science of
modernity. And, from its outset, sociology was determined by contingency. Georg
Simmel (1989a [1900]: 100; cf. Ernst, 1907: 8–9) stated that sociology, like cognition
in general, was a ‘free-floating process’ (freischwebender Prozeß), and that it was ‘per-
fectly acceptable that our image of the world “floats in the air” because the world itself
does so’. Simmel heralded the sociology of knowledge, which was, less than a genera-
tion later, to become one of sociology’s key inventions (or discoveries). Karl Mannheim
(1985 [1929]), for instance and par excellence, outlined the ‘essentially relational
structure of human cognition’ (pp. 257–258), which was caused by and generated con-
temporary life’s ‘existential aporia’ (p. 38) and ‘fundamental discord’ (p. 47) as it
unfolds through realities characterised by ‘twilight’ and ‘relativity’ (pp. 76–77). In a
kindred observation of the condition of ‘Western’ cognition and perception, Blumenberg
(1964: 13–14; cf. Berger, 1970) depicts how modern realities, whether cultural or indi-
vidual, constitute ‘realities of open contexts’ that ‘refuse any unambiguous understand-
ing, any certain action’. In fact, ‘for the modern epoch, reality is a context’ (Blumenberg,
1964: 21).
It may be argued that a major constituent of what makes classical sociology classical
is its will to comply with the preconditions of its being and, accordingly, to extend what
Michael Makropoulos (1997: 32) has depicted as ‘the general strategic disposition’ or
‘structural formula’ of modernity: classical sociology was a reduction as well as a prolif-
eration of contingency through the ‘targeted processing of contingency’. A second major
component in rendering classical sociology classical is its place within classical moder-
nity (see König, 1987; Makropoulos, 1995; Peukert, 1987; Plessner, 1985 [1960]).
Sociology, particularly its German variant, emerged as a remarkable component of a
momentous, transgressing and formidably creative discourse consisting of literature, art,
architecture, industrial design, music, cultural theory, philosophy and essayistic reflec-
tion that had as its quest the modern experience of contingency – that is, the sweeping,
profound experience that made modernity modern.2
Robert Musil, the Austrian novelist, essayist and author of the colossal, unfinished
novel The Man Without Qualities (two volumes published in 1930 and 1933), was a
prominent contributor to the classical modern style of thought.3 Musil’s biography was
vital and typical: he was a trained engineer, had a great interest in mathematics and later
received a PhD in psychology and philosophy in Berlin, only to alter his life course again
and become a writer and devote his intellect to the novel and the essay, or, more pre-
cisely, the essayistic novel. Milan Kundera (2005 [2005]: 68) calls The Man Without
Qualities a ‘novel that thinks’. George Steiner (1995: 101; cf. Armstrong, 2005) pro-
motes Musil as one of few novelists to be above all a ‘thinker’ with a ‘systematic
Isenberg 57

intellect’ and suggests that should the notion of literature vanish, Musil would still be
present.4
Musil’s proximity to the sociology of classical modernity is manifest and differenti-
ated. His work possesses the themes, conceptions, questions and the disposition to create
human types. Musil was personally acquainted with notable sociologists as well as with
philosophers and psychologists, and was in correspondence with many of them. As a
student, he had attended Simmel’s lectures. The readings of Simmel, Max Weber,
Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, Leopold von Wiese and Joseph Schumpeter are explic-
itly discussed in his diaries. Musil was an observer; his sociological gaze penetrated the
life worlds of the social and the psyche. His efforts to understand, describe and explore
the realities and possibilities of modern life were scientifically pointed but not reduced
to formal scientific method and theory.
Correspondingly, Musil’s work appears in sociological reflection not merely as an
illustration but as a sociological reflection in its own right.5 For that reason, in response
to Steiner’s remark about Musil as a ‘thinker’, one could add that should the discipline
of sociology one day vanish, sociological reflection through literature would continue
with Musil.
Against this background, I would like to turn to the central discussion of this text,
which is guided by three complementary purposes.
First, the essay elaborates on what I will argue constitute the two central questions in
the oeuvre of Robert Musil: the theorem of human shapelessness and the problematic
relation between rationality and sentiments in the modern age. I will argue that these sets
of problems are of key sociological and social psychological significance as they consti-
tute variations of the overall problem of sociology, namely, modernity’s cultural and
mental dispositions.
Second, the essay will discuss the significance of Musil’s discourse on the nature and
functions of stupidity. The discussion will be deployed against the essentially sociologi-
cal background of the two central issues of his oeuvre; in other words, stupidity will be
moulded as a recurrent and acute manifestation of modernity’s intrinsic dilemmas. I will
especially address what Musil calls ‘functional stupidity’ and the relevance of this idea
for understanding certain cognitive, psychological and moral dispositions in modern
culture.
Third, throughout the essay, Musil’s reflections on modernity will be related to central
problems, concepts and topics of classical sociology and social psychology, primarily
represented by Simmel and Weber and also by Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim,
Robert Ezra Park and Ferdinand Tönnies. Classical sociology as well as the intellectual
or essayistic novel will be presented as manifestations of the transdisciplinary and extra-
disciplinary classical modern discourse at large.
The article will refer to Musil’s essay ‘On stupidity’ (originally a lecture) as well as to his
great novel and his cultural and literary essays. Essentially, Musil’s entire work may be
considered a fragmented unity or unified fragments, where boundaries between forms of
reflection and presentation are shadowy. By combining different cultures of reflection, nota-
bly literature and sociology (cf. Lepenies, 1988 [1985]), Musil presents a marginal man
(Park, 1928), a Third party (Simmel, 1992 [1908]) and a stranger (Simmel, 2008 [1908]).
58 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

Stupidity – Imaginative, encouraged and institutionalised

Musil delivered his lecture ‘On stupidity’ in Vienna on 11 March 1937 (Musil, 1994a
[1937]: 268–286; cf. Amann, 2007: 120–144, Corino, 2003: 1221–1254). Musil, at the
time a well-known author of novels, plays and essays, and not least of what would
become his uncompleted lifework, The Man Without Qualities, was invited by Der
Österreichische Werkbund, a professional association of craftsmen, artists, architects and
entrepreneurs. Public response was poor. The press mentioned the lecture politely, and
nothing was altered when Musil repeated his speech a week later.
Circumstances were sinister. What influence could the author of an essayistic, experi-
mental, seemingly endless novel about a man without qualities possibly have on a world
that had been penetrated to its bare soul by political religions (red, brown and black), a
world that cried out for totality and human qualities accomplished through charismatic
and messianic leaders, themselves crystallisations of classes, parties and races? The
world of yesterday was long lost in the futile Great War; gone was the chaos after 1918,
the nervousness and the extremes, the economic and moral inflation, the boom of failed
and vengeful politics (cf. Kaube, 2014; Peukert, 1987; Radkau, 1998; Raulet, 1984;
Voegelin, 2000 [1938]; Zweig, 2013 [1942]).
Musil’s personal life was also disquieting. His health was faltering, his writing and
life were private matters, and he was nearly destitute. It was the last year of what was left
of Austria, of the corporate state, of Austria’s clerico-fascism. Musil would soon leave
Vienna with his Jewish wife Martha. In Switzerland, a publication ban was imposed on
émigré writers. Musil died in Geneva in 1942. The endless work on the endless novel had
continued; chapters were buried under outlines, variants and observations. The novel
truly was written in the subjunctive mood, according to a ‘sense of possibilities’, by a
‘man of possibilities’ – everything would also be possible in a different way (Musil,
1995a [1930]: 10–13; cf. Plessner, 1982 [1968], Schöne, 1966).
Musil had occasionally shown an interest in the essence and forms of stupidity. In
1930 (Musil, 1983a: 699), he wrote in his diary, ‘One ought to establish a society against
the proliferation of stupidity’. Musil wanted to respond to what he considered an institu-
tionalised stupidity that was found in everyday life, such as in politics, education and the
arts, with a counter-institution, which, of course, was never realised. In his abundant
1937 lecture, stupidity is defined only vaguely. Musil, on one hand, talks of ‘permanent’
or ‘constitutional’ stupidity, a form of stupidity which is ‘honorable’ and ‘straightfor-
ward’. Such stupidity is what we would otherwise call imbecility or idiocy. To Musil, this
form is not really interesting, as it neither demonstrates any historical or political signifi-
cance, nor constitutes any essential characteristic of contemporary society. ‘Functional
stupidity’, on the other hand, is a penetrating, pressing and prevalent state of mind in
modern society, a momentous feature and an element of modern culture – and accord-
ingly of novelistic and sociological interest. Whereas constitutional stupidity expresses
plain incapacity, functional or ‘occasional’ stupidity is a matter of simultaneous reluc-
tance to recognise complexity and inclination to instrumentalise the mind. This volun-
tary subordination might be dispassionate or fanatical and relates to not only collective
ideologies, nationalism and totalitarianism but also excessive rationalism. Functional
stupidity, thus, embraces intelligence, also extensive intelligence – it is ‘elevated’, Musil
Isenberg 59

(1994a [1937]: 275) writes, and far more dangerous than the permanent stupidity of cer-
tain individuals which is, in turn, more or less permanent in all cultures.
Musil (1995b [1933]: 1335–1352) was also interested in the opposite of stupidity, in
genius, the mind or spirit (Geist). If people are socialised, encouraged, in fact, educated
to render instrumental their mind, thus to become stupid, would it not be conceivable to
raise them to genius as well? It was a Musilian question.
The lecture was also Musilian. It could have constituted a lengthy reflection in the
novel, and thus a reflection on modernity, its cultural and mental dispositions, as this
may be said to be the central problem of Musil’s work, indeed a feature which situates it
in a category where we also find works by Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Marcel
Proust, James Joyce and other authors of the classical modern ‘intellectual’ novel. Ulrich,
the man without qualities, stares out the window, his favourite pose. He has an opulent,
subjunctive mind, a reflective ability of the highest intrinsic value, a will to imagine the
things and the order of things in different ways simultaneously; everything may and will
be conceived of in several ways, as coincidence and as opportunity, as the realisation of
possibilities. Musil embraces the latest observations in science, especially contemporary
psychology and its focus on the contingent nature of the soul, as well as the influences
from the external world. It all revolves around a single point: man. Ulrich besah sich den
Menschen is a recurrent image of the novel. Ulrich observed man and wondered not only
how man had become what he is but also how he could become another.
The novel, according to Musil (1978c [1931]) not a novel ‘at all’ but rather an essay
of ‘immense dimensions’, presents a typology of men (antagonistic, complementary)
that corresponds to and expresses a society and its institutions (p. 1410). In this effort,
Musil approaches core dispositions of classical sociology and beyond. Tönnies (1991
[1887]: xlii) constructed ‘normal types’ to interpret society’s and man’s transition from
Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from Wesenwille to Kürwille. More than any other writer,
Weber stressed not only the option but also the necessity for sociology to develop typolo-
gies. To Weber (1988c [1895]), this endeavour should express social science as a ‘sci-
ence of man’ (Wissenschaft vom Menschen) that sought to establish the ‘quality of
humans’ (Qualität der Menschen) (p. 13). Social science should, thus, ask ‘charactero-
logical’ or ‘characterogenetic’ questions (Weber, 1978 [1910]: 50).6 In a similar manner
that was characteristic of the period, Musil set out on his intellectual undertaking,
whether novelistic or essayistic (or, such as in his PhD thesis in psychology and philoso-
phy, scientific) as an effort to develop a ‘science of man’ (Musil, 1983a: 137; cf. Vatan,
2000). He used the expression Typus Mensch (human type, Musil, 1995a [1930]: 269) to
designate contemporary life forms, and the novel’s main characters represent different
contemporary types. Simmel frequently returned to discussions on modern ‘ways of life’
and ‘conducts of life’ (Lebensstile and Lebensführungen) and generated a series of socio-
psychological types alongside his forms of interaction (see Simmel, 1989a [1900]:
Chapter 6). Robert Ezra Park (1928), another student of Simmel in Berlin, outlined ‘the
marginal man’ as the ‘personality type’ that is socialised on the margin between two or
more cultures and who knows all there is to know about ‘spiritual instability, intensified
self-consciousness, restlessness and malaise’ (p. 893). Park’s work, which was conceptu-
ally highly influenced by Simmel, contained ideas that would be recurrent in later ver-
sions of the differentiated Chicago school of sociology, for instance, in the works by
60 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

Louis Wirth and Erving Goffman. Erich Fromm (1994 [1941]: 275–296) would take up
the discussion of human types in the notion of the ‘social character’, a notion that was,
in turn, applied and unfolded in David Riesman’s (1950) study on ‘the lonely crowd’.7 In
his elaborations of sociology as an ‘art form’, Robert Nisbet (2004 [1976]: 68–93) dis-
cusses the discipline’s use of ‘role-types’ or ‘portraits’ – the bourgeois, the bureaucrat,
the worker and the intellectual – as recurrent means to describe features of typical
humans in modern society. If we look at the nineteenth-century French novel, notably the
work of Honoré de Balzac, we find early novelistic, proto-sociological aspirations of
composing human types.
However, Musil was not interested only in elaborating on human types and their rela-
tions to existing culture and institutions, which are often marked by characteristics that,
from the outset, became vital and defining sociological problems (crisis, the collapse of
social orders, urban multitudes, nationalism, political extremism, social and mental
homelessness, as well as ephemeral identities) – that is, manifestations of a culture of
contingency and transition. Thus, Musil was not interested in exploring only ‘the psyche
of his age’ (Harrington, 2002b: 66), whether the psychological psyche or the cultural. In
his novel and in his essays, his ‘essayistic thinking’ and his ‘essayism’ (Musil, 1995a
[1930]: 267–277) were a combination of the philosophical and the poetic, of truth and
subjectivity, and a unification of essence and form through variations and combinations
headed for an ‘intellectual and spiritual expedition’. It was a ‘research odyssey’ (Musil,
1978b: 1940) into the human possible, to the possible human.8 Fundamentally, ‘life is
always more exhaustive than its actual results’ (Musil, 1978b: 1439), and ‘possible reali-
ties’ are more appealing than ‘real possibilities’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 12). Reality,
including man himself, becomes a mission. The figure of Ulrich is an affirmation of the
culture of contingency, of Musil’s attempt to give life transitional, possible forms. It is
also a manifestation of Musil’s preference for literature over science (see Luft, 1980:
14–18) and of his view that his colossal essayistic novel expressed the most severe type
of understanding of a field in which theoretical and methodological precision are
insufficient.
Stupidity is a manifestation of both the human real and the human possible. Man is
similarly inventive and imaginative with regard to stupidities as with regard to matters of
reason and wisdom and, possibly, genius. For Musil, this understanding pertains to two
aspects of the principal question of man’s essence and form, nature and differentiation,
existence and possibilities; it concerns two variants of the problem of man that also
delineates Musil’s reflection.
The first question concerns man’s historical essence. The second question concerns
the relation between reason and sentiments. Both problems are present in Musil’s obser-
vation on stupidity, and both demonstrate profound contingency and volatility. Both also
express modern dilemmas, a dilemmatic modernity; they express, in fact, modernity as
dilemma, as impassibility and as aporia. Accordingly, both are at the core of sociology.

The theorem of human shapelessness

Throughout his work, Musil returns to a set of questions and reflections that he summa-
rises in the theorem of human shapelessness (Theorem der menschlichen Gestaltlosigkeit,
Isenberg 61

see Musil, 1994b [1921], 1994c [1923], 1995a [1930]: 234, 270, 391, 449). This motif is
deeply founded in classical modern reflection, whether sociological, philosophical or
aesthetic. Nietzsche (1988a [1884]) had outlined the images of ‘the death of God’ (p.
#125) and of man as ‘the animal that is not yet defined’ (Nietzsche, 1988b [1886]: #62).
Laying the foundation for the interactionist paradigm in social psychology, Simmel
(1989b [1890]) presents man’s modern ‘essence’ as a ‘crossing of countless social
threads’ (p. 241) and as an ‘intersection between the self and an unknown circle of
injunctions’ (Simmel, 1996a [1919]: 404). Consequently, his ‘soul’ is in a state of ‘trans-
mutability’, a ‘permanent fluctuation’ between moving and changing conditions and,
accordingly, ‘less a succession between Yes and No and more of their simultaneousness’
(Simmel, 1996b [1919]: 341). Simmel (1991 [1892–1893]: 123, 115) denies any ‘anthro-
pological unity’, any ‘absolute’ subjectivity or soul; such ideas, he says (Simmel, 1989c
[1892–1893]: 182, 185), are mere ‘superstition’.9 Weber varied this idea and this experi-
ence of psychic hypertrophy that is typical of modern man. Modernity ‘besieges’ man;
he is but a function, a reflection of the steadily more complex realities in society (Weber,
1988a [1910]: 453). Moreover, what man experiences are but segments or sections of
reality: seeing (also for the observer of modern man, that is, the sociologist) is seeing
from a certain ‘standpoint’ (Weber, 1988b [1904]: 181). On the eve of classical moder-
nity, the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner (1975 [1928]; cf. Fischer, 2000),
a lonely liberal in the Weimar Republic, identified the human condition as ‘eccentricity’
(exzentrische Positionalität): man is a reflexive form of life, and as such, his relation to
the external world is open and undetermined. After 1933, Arnold Gehlen (1986 [1957–
1961], 1997 [1940]) described man’s ‘essential lack of instincts’ and his lack of speciali-
sation (in turn, a human specialisation): man is fundamentally ‘open to the world’ and
exposed to a permanent ‘sensory overload’. Habits and institutions emerge and constitute
defensive responses to this modern dilemma and to modernity as dilemma. The idea of
man’s openness was also elaborated in different versions of the Chicago school, whether
conceptual or empirical: the self as socially constructed entity, a permanently changing
outcome of processes of internalisation and externalisation. Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann (1967 [1966]: 17–18) establish some of their propositions on the social con-
struction of reality and of knowledge on the general assumption of man’s indefiniteness
by referring to George Herbert Mead and also Plessner and Gehlen.
Musil writes that man’s essence is his form and that man’s form is conferred on him
by history. Man changes in accordance with situations and circumstances but does not
change himself. Man is ‘the quintessence of his possibilities’, ‘potential man’ (Musil,
1995a [1930]: 270), something ‘malleable’ (Musil, 1994b [1921]: 114), ‘a liquid mass
that has to be shaped’ (Musil, 1978d [1920]: 1348). Man, Musil (1994b [1921]) contin-
ues, emerges as a ‘substratum’ whose ‘good and evil range equally widely in him, like
the pointer on a sensitive scale’ (p. 114). Consequently, ‘human nature is as capable of
cannibalism as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 391). In brief,
man is an Ungestalt (Musil, 1978f [1921]: 1072), an amorphism, at the disposal of him-
self and others, for autonomy and heteronomy, for the beautiful and for the bloody, for
stupidity and possibly for genius. In general, man’s amorphous nature is laid bare in the
very logic of modernity and its very principle, the ‘P.I.C.’, the ‘Principle of Insufficient
Cause’, which states that ‘everything that happens happens for no good or sufficient
62 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

reason’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 140) – it could have happened in another way as well, or
not at all.
Musil’s theorem accentuates the notion that man and society, action and culture, con-
cur with each other closely so that one may be separated from the other merely conceptu-
ally. Again, what Musil expresses is an idea that would become one of sociology’s
truisms. It became paradigmatic already in Tönnies’ (1991 [1887]) work on the relations
between Gemeinschaft and Wesenwille and between Gesellschaft and Kürwille. Notably,
Tönnies emphasises the anthropological or psychological side of the matter, not the soci-
ological. The most elaborate discussion may perhaps be found in Weber’s sociology.
Man, as such, is ‘situated’ (hineingestellt) in social contexts, Weber (1988c [1895]: 13)
writes; his ‘life conduct’ emerges and develops and is moulded by historically given
‘life-spheres’ such as capitalism, science and religion (Weber, 1958a [1919]: 123).
Between life conduct and life-spheres, there is a compelling correspondence or ade-
quacy. In modern society, essentially a man-made society (i.e. a culture), the adequate
type of humanity is ‘civilized man’, the Kulturmensch (Weber, 1958a [1919]: 140).
Riesman (1950) builds on Weber’s legacy and emphasises the relation between types of
character and society. He becomes a key figure in conceptually establishing the vital
relation between man and his social context.10
For Musil (1994c [1923]), man is amorphous, malleable, ‘liberated’ (p. 176) from solid
bonds that melt and are replaced by institutions resting on the P.I.C. The entire modern
culture, Musil (1994c [1923]: 171–172) states, appears as an ‘undirected condition, a
leftover abject confusion, like iron filings scattered in an unmagnetised field’. Everything
exists simultaneously, next to each other, through each other, in each other in an ‘infinitely
interwoven surface’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 709) of realities and possibilities. Ulrich states,
‘There’s no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something
moving about in a general culture-medium’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 234). This reflection
corresponds with Georg Lukács’ (1971 [1916]: 67) theory of the novel, a theory that may
also be deployed as a sociological theory of the mental and cultural dispositions of moder-
nity and that proposes as the vital problem of modernity the ‘mutually determining’ reali-
ties of the ‘problematic individual’ and the ‘contingent world’.
Any reality, any present moment, Musil (1995a [1930]) concludes, becomes ‘nothing
but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted’ (p. 269).11 In turn, the hypothetical
nature of man and modernity, of the ‘Babylonian madhouse’ of the ‘helpless Europe’
(Musil, 1994d [1922]: 128), became a central target for modernity’s will to power and
knowledge, whether through science or capitalism, subjectivity or culture. Typically, in
the first decades of the twentieth century, totalitarian movements were involved in revo-
lutionary processings of contingency and the fundamental conversion of modern ‘ubiq-
uity’, of ‘the age of the provisional’ (Paul Valéry quoted in Löwith, 1971: 95) into new,
unambiguous totalities. Specifically, their resentment and utopias were expressed
through a conceited ‘anthropological pig-Latin’ (Musil, 1994b [1921]: 106). To Musil,
nationalism and totalitarianism are manifestations of the most treacherous forms of func-
tional stupidity – of politicised, ideologised stupidity, or, put differently, of the politicisa-
tion and ideologisation of the mind and its subordination to masses and programmes.
Musil formulates an entirely realistic anthropology. Man is reality and possibility
alike; he is the realisation of what had once emerged as historical options, and he
Isenberg 63

expresses options for further realisations. He constitutes a historical variation, a critical

combination in a state of permanent crisis. He is at the same time a resource, a matter for
himself and a human form capable of many things or anything.
This is valid for man as a species, as well as for each individual. It is also true for man
as collective, man in the collectivised form. Collectivisation was the characteristic of the
time and included conformity, opportunism and subordination. Collectivisation was the
immediate historical symptom of what Mannheim (1985 [1929]: 222) described as con-
temporary man’s ‘aproblematic congruence with being’. Collectivisation would be man-
ifest through the masses of democratic cultures (already observed by Alexis de
Tocqueville), but the typical variant was totalitarianism.12
The epoch was nationalistic, fanatical, totalitarian and rationalistic. Totalitarianism sub-
jugates and makes the mind instrumental. The intellect becomes an element of the terror, of
a uniform mental life where every disparate thought, every counter-argument, every ques-
tion is illegitimate.13 It expresses an intentional stupidification and turns into ‘applied stu-
pidity’ or ‘stupidity in action’ (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 275, quoting Johannes E. Erdmann).
More specifically, Musil writes, totalitarianism was the most menacing and murder-
ous political form of stupidity, in the sense that individual qualities and needs, including
different elements of stupidity, became socially imitated and turned into collective ‘arro-
gance’ by and in the ‘body politic’ (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 273, 285). These elements,
Musil says, included tendencies (readiness, willingness and ability) towards exaggera-
tion, unrestraint, contempt, patronisation, revenge and malice: I became we, and we were
the party, the nation, the class, the race, sects and art styles. They were brought forward
by a ‘shameless’ ‘lower middle class of mind and soul’ (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 272).
Weber (1988d [1904–1905]: 204), in the concluding observations of the spirit of capital-
ism, described these tendencies as ‘convulsive self-importance’. They may be perceived
as excessive, grotesque yet current manifestations of what Blumenberg (1988: 151, 259)
describes as the ‘existential programme’ of modernity, namely self-assertion – the asser-
tion of man, of cultures and of the individual in a world where meaning and social order
vanish and ‘the minimum of ontological disposition’ is at the same time ‘the maximum
of constructive potentiality’.
If this ‘social imitation of mental defects’ (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 285) was inflicted, it
was not necessarily also stupid. However, essentially it was a combination of commit-
ment, encouragement and not least institutionalised education and training. It was an
‘elevated’ form of stupidity (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 275).
Functional stupidity is, without doubt, the most vital concept in Musil’s lengthy dis-
cussion. Generally, functional stupidity is a sign of simultaneous autonomy and heter-
onomy, hypertrophy and atrophy. It is modernity doing the splits, its own squared circle
– a modern specialty, a specialty that makes modernity modern. Referring to Simmel
again, functional stupidity manifests the very modern soul of transmutability, its politici-
sation and its ideologisation. It is a modern calamity.

Precision and soul

In Musil’s essay on stupidity, an entire catalogue of special stupidities may be found: the
philistine, calculating man of facts; the stubborn, who soon turns foolish; the fanatic; the
64 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

man of reality, obsessed with the idea that nothing could have been otherwise; the
pseudo-authentic or kitschy; the collectivised; the hideously self-assertive; the confirmed
imbecile. Occasionally, they are expressed in the characters of Musil’s novels.
Like any human manifestation, stupidity, notably functional or what Musil (1994a
[1937]: 284) also calls ‘occasional’ stupidity, is a matter of man’s essential shapelessness
and of the close correspondence between society and history, on one hand, and personal-
ity and character, on the other hand. Subjectivity, to Musil, the psychologist, the novelist,
the observer, is but a social and historical nexus.
However, stupidity is also related to another problem. It is a problem that renders
stupidity modern and acute – in fact, acutely modern.
The problem concerns the relation between reason and sentiments, between ‘preci-
sion and soul’.14 It is a decisive relationship for history, for man, for the spirit and for
peace; it is a fateful question.
In modernity, the relation is characterised by an increased imbalance and capricious-
ness. Changes are swift. The scope and the intensity of both intellect and feelings grow,
and they appear to move in any direction and for no obvious reason.
The habitual narrative of modernity is that of rationalisation, specialisation, institu-
tionalisation and secularisation. It is a prosaic age, ‘the age of facts’ (Musil, 1994c
[1923]: 176). ‘One can, in principle, master all things by calculation’, reads Weber’s
(1958b [1919]: 139) formula. Ernst Troeltsch (1922) observes a world that strives for
‘unity’ through rationalism; rationalism, in turn, is the opposite of contingency (p. 778).
To Simmel, calculation, rationality, institutionalisation, technology and bureaucracy are
predestined to an autonomous development that seizes human will and subjectivity. This
produces nothing less than ‘the tragedy of culture’ (Simmel, 1996a [1919]), a culture
whereby the world is reduced to an ‘arithmetical problem’ (1989a [1900]: 612). In the
most pitiless of all verdicts, modernity is a ‘mathematised’, ‘liquidated’ world
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1988 [1944]: 31, 19). This process is intensified: ‘accelera-
tionism’, Musil writes (1995a [1930]: 436), is the super-ideology of the modern world,
an auto-dynamics that sweeps everything along with it that is not left at that.15
However, modernity also signifies amplified emotionality. Emotionality concerns
individuals, some of whom are lost in the endless sea of subjectivism; others (or most)
embody ‘psychologism’ (Simmel, 1996b [1919]: 346) as the key path to understanding
and action in modernity. In fact, Simmel states, psychologism is nothing less than ‘the
essence of modernity’. Above all, from time to time, emotions explode in fanaticism, that
‘formless excess of feelings’ (Musil, 1994e [1912]: 22) that searches for shape and an
abode and that may be ingeniously combined with discipline. Fanaticism may also be a
reaction to the contemporary, typical ‘ratioide’ human form, that ‘trained vulgarity’
(Musil, 1994c [1923]: 160, 182) and that ‘nullity’ (Weber, 1988d [1904–1905]: 204).
For Musil, the volatile relation between intellect and emotion, between mathematics
and mysticism, truth and subjectivity, modernity and religion, precision and soul, the
profane and the sacred is an essential cause of modernity’s pathologies. This volatile
relation was a vital cause of that ‘final explosion’ of the First World War and had been
latent – indeed, ‘prepared’ – for a long time (Musil, 1978e [1918]: 1343). The war broke
out and created a world of yesterday. This was not because of nationalism and colonial-
ism, which were mere ‘intermediate causes’ (Musil, 1978e [1918]: 1343); rather, the
Isenberg 65

origin was general and ‘European’ (p. 1343). For an extended period, any war seemed
impossible. However, just before the outbreak – in fact, ‘overnight’ (Musil, 1978e [1918]:
1342) – it became inevitable and desired. Musil’s great novel addresses Vienna, Kakania,
the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire, that exemplary expression of modernity with its
rare mix of cultures and mentalities, from August 1913 to August 1914. From this
moment, ancient, forgotten, obscure, enchanted thoughts and convictions reappeared.
Suddenly, people all over Europe ‘had enough of peace’ (Musil, 1978e [1918]: 1343).
They called for ‘a revolution against that evolution which had come to a standstill’
(Musil, 1978e [1918]: 1343), against the disoriented, lethargic, ‘helpless’ Europe. The
war was ‘the will for disorder rather than the old order, the leap into adventure’, a ‘flight
from peace’ (Musil, 1994b [1921]: 112).
The Great War was a catastrophic explosion and, Musil (1978e [1918]) writes, surely
not an isolated, one-off affair but a ‘recurrent phenomenon in world history’ (p. 1343).
Musil refers to the recurrence of ‘metaphysical bangs’ that pile up in times of peace like
‘residues of discontent’. They embody a ‘revolution of the soul’ against the existing
mentality or social order (Musil, 1994d [1922]: 129). Outcomes are subordinated, wrath
and fanaticism are everything; it is a total and totalising experience that provides an
existential foundation beyond conventional modern rationality and individuality. In their
respective reflections, expressed in a pronounced vitalist vocabulary well beyond con-
ventional sociology, Martin Buber (quoted in Koren, 2010: 100) defined the eruption of
the Great War as the ‘Vesuvian hour’, and Simmel (quoted in Blumenberg, 1983: 47)
declared the sudden paroxysm an ‘absolute situation’.
For Musil, perennial metaphysical crashes are closely related to the unstable relation
between intellect and soul, between rationality and that which reason defines (and dis-
qualifies) as irrational. They are a result of shapeless excesses of emotions that are incon-
sistent with reason. Generally, there are emotions and there is no abundance of reason;
however, there is a fundamental lack of balance, and we surely have too little rational
insight into the matter of the soul. Modernity signifies the intensified relation between
the two human faculties. Our time, Musil (1994f [1934]) writes, has become a Notersatz,
a ‘makeshift substitute’ (p. 145) for a world in which the relation between reason and
sentiments is reconciled. We consider this substitute real, true and good for the very rea-
son it exists. Religious questioning, existential matter and things that are not within the
reach of our objective and scientific vocabulary are declared anathema or, at least, dis-
pensable. For this reason, modernity, for all its individuality and reflexivity, is ‘unbear-
ably Philistine’ (Musil, 1994c [1923]: 157).
The troublesome relation between intellect and soul is aggravated by the absence of a
fundamental idea or ideal in modernity – the absence of a common ‘ethos’, that is, an
‘eternal truth’ that, naturally, would be ‘neither eternal nor true, but valid for some time
to serve as a standard for people to go by’ (Musil, 1995b [1933]: 1090). During their
‘holy discourse’, which revolves around the options of an association of modernity and
mysticism through an ethos and, thus, a ‘dereification of the self as of the world’ (Musil,
1994c [1923]: 187), Ulrich tells his sister Agathe, ‘I’m instructing myself about the ways
to the holy life’, and ‘I’m not religious; I’m studying the road to holiness to see if it might
also be possible to drive a car on it!’ (Musil, 1995b [1933]: 815). Later, Ulrich, a ‘bad’
Catholic, states, ‘I don’t believe that God has been here yet, but that He is still to come.
66 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

But only if we pave the way for Him more than we have so far!’ (Musil, 1995b [1933]:
1109). Elsewhere in the novel, a novel that is ‘religious under the conditions of the non-
believer’ (Musil, 1978b: 1940), Musil (1995a [1930]) emphasises our prejudiced, ‘pro-
foundly unmodern’ (p. 211) attitude to God: ‘we simply cannot imagine him in tails,
clean-shaven, with neatly parted hair; our image of him is still patriarchal’. Man himself
has to pave the way and to imagine God in a timely manner. The lack of a profound idea,
a profound morality, a profound life content means that thinking, emotions, truth and
belief are unfinished; they are subordinated to the principle of insufficient cause. Thus,
reason runs the risk of being enticed and functionalised, and emotional life ‘slops back
and forth like water in an unsteady tub’ (Musil, 1995b [1933]: 1117).16
Musil’s account of the cultural and mental situation in which the Great War begins is
a statement on what he considers the insufficiency of the social and cultural sciences. In
their conventional form, these are utterly modern; they take on disenchanted entities or
intermediary causes and contexts, such as nationalism, colonialism, rationalisation and
secularisation. However, humans and cultures are also driven by other motives.
Revolutions of the soul, recurrent metaphysical bangs, fanatical leaps into adventures
and other irrational eruptions emerge as inconceivable in a society with a general for-
mula of mastering by calculation. Musil’s own science of man integrates and combines
different elements of cultural science, psychology, sociology, the novel and the essay. He
is an exemplary classical modern thinker. The combination of different approaches to
mapping the fractured, contingent, variable landscapes (cultural and mental) of moder-
nity was typical of the transgressive discourse of classical modernity, whether the empha-
sis was on fiction or the concept.
In his essay on the ‘spiritual situation’ of the early Weimar Republic – a situation
determined by ‘relativism’, ‘isolation’ and ‘exile’ – Siegfried Kracauer (1995 [1922])
compiles a typology of those who ‘linger in the void’ (p. 135). There is the ‘skeptic as a
matter principle’ (Kracauer, 1995 [1922]: 135), or the ‘intellectual desperado’ (p. 138),
who realises the seriousness of the situation and will not surrender to any faith or any
ideology with absolute claims. There are the ‘short-circuit people’ (Kracauer, 1995
[1922]: 136), ‘refugees from the vacuum’ (p. 138) who seek any ‘sheltering abode’ (p.
136), religious or quasi-religious. Finally, there is an attitude of ‘waiting’ as a ‘hesitant
openness’ (Kracauer, 1995 [1922]: 138) to options that may emerge.
Weber personifies the sceptic desperado par excellence. The number of short-circuit
people in the Weimar Republic was immense (Kracauer fails to mention names). They
may fall under the category of functional stupidity. They searched for meaning and form;
they subordinated reason, emotions and life itself to collective mobilisation. They wanted
the ‘exodus from the disenchanted world’ (Bolz, 1989). ‘Intellectual sacrifice’ became
the disposition of the day; ‘the arms of the old churches’ were opened ‘widely and com-
passionately’ (Weber, 1958b [1919]: 155). This had happened in the initial phase of the
Great War, and surrender again was the response to the ‘horror vacui’ (Kracauer, 1995
[1922]: 132) and the need for further promises after meaningless convulsions.
Regarding the waiting and the hesitant attitude, Musil is a strong case (Kracauer again
mentions no one). Simmel, the vitalist, is another (cf. Lash, 2005), as is Kracauer him-
self. While lingering in the culture of contingency, Ulrich does not say no to life but
rather ‘Not yet!’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 483). His morality is that of the ‘next step’ (Musil,
Isenberg 67

1995b [1933]: 796–810). He expresses a certain ‘active passivism’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]:
386), an attitude that has its own dilemmas: ‘it isn’t courage, willpower, or confidence,
but simply a furious tenacity, as hard to drive out as it is to drive life out of a cat even
after it has been completely mangled by dogs’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 277). Above all,
this attitude expresses Geist (spirit, mind), ‘the great opportunist’ (der große Jenachdem-
Macher), ‘itself impossible to pin down’ (Musil, 1995a [1930]: 163), which consists of
intellect plus sentiments plus morality – morality being a matter of ‘imagination’ (Musil,
1995b [1933]: 1117). Stupidity, to Musil, means the deficiency of these and in the rela-
tions between them. Stupidity is also related to Eingeistigkeit or Geist der Eingeistigkeit
(obtuse intellectuality, Musil, 1978b: 1450, 1452), a seemingly impossible phenomenon
but a pointed image: ironic, Musilian, a contemporary impassibility, and either the inca-
pacity or the reluctance to fathom the order of things in more than one way. Genius, in
turn, indicates the strong and subtle relation between reason, sentiment and imagination.
Genius and Geist are truly significant.17
Musil’s efforts never transformed into political action. His nature was essentially apo-
litical. His ‘categorical’ subjunctive reason (Plessner, 1982 [1968]; cf. Amann, 2007),
which was profoundly compatible with a culture of contingency, and his strong inclina-
tion to comply only conditionally made him incapable of even elementary political
affect. He took no side and thought of it as either objectivity or daimon. The arrival of the
dictatorships was already longed for all over Europe, spiritually, intellectually, out of
boredom and discontent. They appeared in a period when ‘energetic, sweeping action’
was ‘highly esteemed’ (Musil, 1994a [1937]: 280). Musil saw it as a panic which replaced
the very token of human dignity and of the Enlightenment that man was capable of mas-
tering his own life, rationally and in freedom. The infuriated ideologies put humans
before absurd alternatives by which intellect, decency and life itself were sacrificed
(Stalinism or Barbarism!). Collective identities were defined and made humans desirable
or disqualified. In their independent forms, art and literature lacked political signifi-
cance. Whereas contemporary culture ‘is swimming underwater in a sea of reality’,
Musil (1994d [1922]: 126) wrote, and demonstrates aggressiveness towards the mind,
the artist’s truth consists of ‘possible realities’, of dreams, of a not yet redeemed life. In
the novel (1995b [1933]: 1493), Ulrich tells the revolutionary Schmeißer, ‘Politics con-
tains as much of the wealth of reality as of the poverty of the spirit’.
Politics: an enduring disappointment, inferior to the options of the mind. Musil dem-
onstrated an elective affinity with Paul Valéry, who wrote,

Europe stood out clearly from all other parts of the world. Not through politics but despite
politics or rather against them … [The mind] seemed to keep for politics its most careless and
indeed its most trivial aspects: instincts, idols, memories, regrets, envy, meaningless sounds
and dizzy meanings.

Valéry quoted in Bouveresse (1993b: 210)

Musil expressed a temperament close to Simmel’s – another man without qualities, as

David Frisby puts it. Kracauer (quoted in Frisby, 1981: 156–157; cf. Gilloch, 2013), him-
self a waiting sceptic, writes about Simmel, ‘To reveal the relativity of every standpoint
68 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

that is taken for an absolute … that is the tragic, highest achievement of the intellect that
floats in a void’.
Together with Simmel, Kracauer and Valéry, Musil’s constitution was that of ‘eccentric-
ity versus vital positions’ (Fischer, 2010: 204). He was a Simmelian stranger, a Simmelian
Third and a Parkean marginal man.

Concluding remarks
In this essay, I have discussed what I argue are the two central questions in the work of
Robert Musil: the theorem of human shapelessness and the precarious relation between
rationality and sentiments. Against this background, I have presented Musil’s idea of
‘functional stupidity’ as an intrinsic dilemma of modernity. Musil’s reflections on the
culture and mentality of modernity have been related to central problems, concepts and
topics of classical sociology and social psychology throughout the essay.
It may be said that there are three sets of topics and reflections where Musil approaches
classical sociology and provides insights into modernity.
The central problems of man as amorphism and man’s restless wanderings between
reason and emotions are timeless. Yet above all, they represent challenges to modernity.
Musil clearly demonstrated the need for sociology to go beyond its disciplinary borders
and become a ‘combinatory technique’ (Steiner, 1995: 102). From its outset, sociology
was a science that analysed the specific modern structures, institutions, situations and
interactions, in which man is situated and through which his mental and social disposi-
tions are assembled and unfolded. These structures and situations may be advanced by
and inversely resulting in what Musil perceived as revolutions of the soul, fanatical
leaps, metaphysical bangs and other seemingly irrational and atavistic eruptions that
characterised the radically contingent culture of classical modernity. The more critical
the volatile relation between rationality and sentiments and the more formable the human
character, the greater the likelihood for extreme and what might appear as sudden con-
vulsions – and the greater the need to understand this through sociological reflection.
Musil also demonstrates a more apparent adjacency to sociology, not least to classical
sociology. His writings may be considered as novelistic and essayistic variations of cen-
tral theoretical and conceptual approaches developed by Simmel, Tönnies, Weber and
others, and then continued throughout the sociological tradition. Musil explicitly
observes and constructs human types, and he emphasises the correspondence between
man and society, between human types and types of society, between social character and
social structure. Man as social and historical product, as continuously transforming result
of socialisation, is a matter of course in Musil’s endeavour to depict modern man’s evo-
lution, options, dilemmas and aporias. Man emerges as a complex creation in an exces-
sive culture of contingency – such is Musil’s general answer. The classical sociology of
Simmel and Weber would not have it differently – in fact, it is the essential idea of the
classical modern discourse which accommodated both classical sociology and the reflec-
tive, essayistic novel. Moreover, classical modern thinking advanced contingency and
complexity as the very historical, that is modern prerequisites and characteristics of
interpretation, soon to be adapted fully by the emerging sociology of knowledge of
Mannheim and others. The subjunctive mood appeared to be necessity and possibility
Isenberg 69

alike – the necessity and the possibility to interpret man and society and the relation
between them from different perspectives, one outcome of which may be the construc-
tion of human types in order to establish conceptual ‘means of orientation’ (Weber, 1988e
[1915–1919]: 536; cf. 273).
There is a third level of sociological relevance in Musil’s work which concerns spe-
cific topics. Musil tried to understand the human consequences of unrestrained rationali-
sation, including the disregard of emotions and affects, which would one day rebound, as
they did in August 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War. He observed the subordina-
tion of subjectivity and individuality when confronted by technology, bureaucratisation
and monetarisation, indeed another founding and favourite topic in classical sociology,
perhaps most expressively formulated by Simmel. The notion of functional stupidity
adds willingness to this subordination and points to a recurring, penetrating calamity in
modern society. Musil also discussed functional stupidity, including its optional element,
with regard to contemporary collectivising, totalitarian ideologies and their deadly con-
sequences. Totalitarianism and functional stupidity were modern characteristics and
closely related to the amorphism of man and culture, as well as to the volatile relations
between reason and emotions. Furthermore, Musil observed the increasing speed of
modern society, the intensified pace of especially the metropolis, and he regarded this
‘accelerationism’ as a fundamentally endogenous process which affected all spheres of
life. Again, it was an observation which had been conceptualised in classical sociology:
Simmel outlined the ‘tragedy of culture’, and Weber delineated the differentiating pro-
cesses of rationalisation. In fact, already the authors of the Communist Manifesto had
declared the general formula of modernity to be ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
Robert Musil, the novelist and the essayist, the observer and the moralist in the clas-
sical sense, generated insights into modernity which had their obvious pendants in clas-
sical sociology. But he also offered observations beyond the sociology of the classics we
may not wish to ignore.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
  1. For extensive discussions on the notion and experience of contingency, see Von Graevenitz
and Marquard (eds) (1998).
  2. Discussions on the significance of classical modern thinking for understanding our own time
may be found in Peukert (1987, 1988), Sloterdijk (1983: 702–708) and Raulet (1984).
  3. The two original volumes are combined in Musil (1978a [1930–1933]), whereas all post-
humously published chapters and outlines are collected in Musil (1978b). Volume I of the
English translation (Musil, 1995a [1930]) contains the first and second parts originally pub-
lished in 1930. Volume II (Musil, 1995b [1933]) combines the third part, published in 1933,
and most of the posthumously published material.
70 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

  4. In 1931, Musil was nominated to the Prussian Academy by Thomas Mann but was rejected.
His biographer Karl Corino (2003: 798) writes that witnesses confirmed what Musil (1983a)
himself wrote in his diary: he was considered ‘too intelligent to be a true writer’ (p. 921).
  5. Peter Berger (1988, 1970) returns to Musil’s reflections on various occasions, underlining not
only the closeness between Musil and his own social hermeneutics but also the epistemologi-
cal ties between literature and sociology. In his studies on classical modern thinkers, David
Frisby reflects on the similarities of different interpretations, scientific and non-scientific, of
modern culture. Not least, Frisby (1981: 157–164, 2001) indicates thematical and other affini-
ties between Musil and Simmel. Austin Harrington (2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2012) repeatedly
refers to Musil’s relevance as a social theorist, in general, and with regard to specific topics.
Helmut Kuzmics and Gerald Mozetic (2003: 225–258) discuss Musil’s composition of human
types or specific social characters, a conceptual stance that may be found throughout sociol-
ogy. They also emphasise Musil’s exceptional capability for translating social factualities in
what they call the ‘biotops of meaning’ (p. 257). Makropoulos (1997) deploys Musil’s work
in further conceptual combinations and variations, not least to conceptualise modernity as a
culture of contingency. Ramona Kirsch (2002) emphasises the importance of gender construc-
tion in Musil’s fiction, especially his short novels. Hartmut Böhme (1974) discusses the two
core sociological notions of alienation and anomie in Musil’s novel and essays. Curiously,
Wolf Lepenies (1988 [1985]) never mentions Musil in his exceptional work on the emergence
of sociology as the culture of knowledge ‘between literature and science’. Philosophy and
cultural theory are also frequent users of Musil’s thought. In essentially similar vocabular-
ies, Florence Vatan (2000) and Jacques Bouveresse (1993a, 1993b) emphasise Musil as a
philosopher of history and develop Musil’s view on the nature of history and how societies
and man are but forms that are transformed by and through history. Marie-Louise Roth (1972)
presents Musil’s elaborations on ethics and aesthetics as, above all, theoretical considerations.
Manfred Frank (1983) reflects on Musil’s search for foundations of knowledge and concludes
that conventional epistemological foundations are insufficient for the novelist who turns to
mythology.
 6. Summarising Weber’s scientific struggle and complex sociology, Wilhelm Hennis (1987,
1996) argues that Weber’s ‘central question’ was ‘human types’ and ‘conduct of life’.
  7. The idea was changed again in the works of a number of ‘American moralists’ (Isenberg,
2008), such as C Wright Mills, Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher
Lasch, Robert Bellah, Robert Putnam and recently Richard Sennett.
  8. For some elaborations on ‘essayism’ as the prominent form of classical modern reflection, see
Adorno (1984 [1958]), Isenberg (2006) and Nübel (2006).
  9. Musil read Simmel’s Introduction to the Moral Sciences, and the discussions on subjectivity
were imported in the idea of the man without qualities (Musil, 1983b: 851; cf. Köhnke, 1996:
239–240).
10. For further variations, see Bellah et al. (1985), Gerth and Mills (1970 [1953]) and Lipset and
Lowenthal (eds) (1961).
11. Cf. Giddens (1991), who describes modernity’s radical, institutional doubt that leads to all
knowledge as taking the ‘form of hypotheses’ (p. 3).
12. Three classical discussions on collective ideologies and the willingness of intellectuals which
are to some extent consistent with Musil’s observations are offered by Aron (1957 [1955]),
Benda (2006 [1927]) and Milosz (2001 [1953]).
13. Tocqueville repeatedly wrote on illegitimate standpoints in democratic culture: you are
free to express any thought, but if your thought is not also ours, you are no longer one of
us. Submission, self-censorship and deliberate obtuseness follow; when thoughts are not
expressed and questions are not raised, it will soon no longer be possible to think and ask at
all (a particularly dismal form of human depreciation).
Isenberg 71

14. In the novel, Ulrich suggests the establishment of a ‘World Secretariat for Precision and Soul’
to explore the ‘general cultural situation’. He also becomes the secretary of the new body
(Musil, 1995a [1930]: 651).
15. Contemporary variations of Musil’s idea may be found in Han (2012), Rosa (2013), Virilio
(2006 [1977]) and Wajcman (2015).
16. Goltschnigg (1974) demonstrates how Musil’s discussions on mysticism are influenced by
Buber’s (1985 [1909]) Ecstatic Confessions.
17. In the essay on stupidity as well as in the novel (Musil, 1995b [1933]: 1335–1352), Musil uses
the term ‘the significant’ to denote genius and Geist.

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Author biography
Bo Isenberg received his PhD in Sociology at Lund University in 2001. His areas of interest
include classical sociology, cultural sociology and social psychology. Specific research topics
include sociology and literature, classical modern culture, contemporary capitalism and its social
consequences. Isenberg is an Associate Professor at Lund University and has recently been a visit-
ing scholar at Hebrew University, Peking University and Fudan University.