Experts in the Bureau: Capitalism and Private Clerks in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

Mátyás Erdélyi

    Research output: Types of ThesisDoctoral Thesis

    Abstract (may include machine translation)

    The dissertation offers a social and intellectual history of private clerks employed in banking and insurance in the Habsburg Monarchy between the Gründerzeit of the 1850s and the aftermath of the Great War. It raises the question, how did the mindset, habitus, and ideology of private clerks become constitutive of the changes the modernizing society and economy of the Habsburg Monarchy went through in this period, and how can their understanding of modernity be contrasted to other answers offered to the “great transformation” of the nineteenth century. The dissertation relies on three clusters of theoretical and historiographical ideas to address Habsburg modernity from the perspective of private clerks: the conceptualization of capitalist modernity by Werner Sombart and Max Weber; the rise of numbers and the historical development of credibility in quantification; and the presupposition of a common Habsburg framework for the social and intellectual history of private clerks. Through the lens of this conceptual framework, the dissertation can bypass the shortcomings of modernization theories and the normativity of descriptions like “failed,” “uneven,” and “belated” modernization to produce a comprehensive account of the “great transformation” in Central Europe in its larger contexts. The development of financial capitalism in the Habsburg Monarchy produced its own cadre of professionals in the form of bookkeepers, correspondents, cashiers, and so forth. The need for specialized workforce brought about the emergence of vocational schooling on the secondary level beginning in the late 1850s. Their labor movements sought to improve the legal and financial situation of private employees; this involved the creation of firm social frontiers between the working classes and private clerks as well as the affirmation of their belonging to the Bildungsbürgertum. The activities of private clerk associations were closely entangled with the development of state interventionism that was often equally sought for and disapproved of by the social group. Efforts at class formation challenged the capacity of the state to enforce civil and political rights against the power of economic elites. Social categories like nationality and gender intersected the development of the social group. Language differences were differently approached by dominant and minority ethnic groups in both halves of the Habsburg Monarchy. The numerical growth of female private clerks after the turn of the century coincided with their increasing discrimination on multiple levels. Women were systematically discriminated in the educational system and entered the job market with a considerable disadvantage compared to men. Discrimination against women was equally practiced by employers and employee associations. Lastly, the experts and professionals that populate the universe of this thesis often turned to quantification and used “mechanical objectivity” to gain public credibility. In debates over old-age pensions, mathematicians were forced to share the “secret of actuarial calculations” with the public to gain credibility. Trust in numbers, though, was not the only way to create public credibility in capitalist endeavors. Credit cooperatives turned to the idea of community as a potential guarantee of financial solvency.
    Original languageEnglish
    Publisher
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2019

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