Anton Orel (sociologist)

Anton Orel (17 September 1881 – 11 July 1959) was an Austrian sociologist and philosopher of history.

Biography

Anton Orel was born in Vienna, the eldest son of an imperial and royal military doctor; the musicologist Alfred Orel was one of his brothers. Due to an official transfer of his father, Anton Orel first attended the grammar school in Olomouc, then the Jesuit grammar school in Kalksburg, where he graduated in 1899. He began to study in Vienna, joined the Norica university fraternity and a student congregation in the University Church. He also maintained friendly relations with the Slovenian student association Danica. Through his numerous contacts, he got to know several personalities from the rising Christian Social Party (CS), as well as Alcide De Gasperi, later Italian Prime Minister and Károly Huszár, later Hungarian Prime Minister.

Ideologically strongly influenced by the writings of the Catholic social reformer Karl von Vogelsang, in whose succession he saw himself and in whose Viennese publishing house he published songs by Joseph von Eichendorff. Orel founded the Christian Federation of Austrian Labour Youth in 1904 or 1905. Marc Sangnier's Sillon youth movement served as a practical model for him. One member of the organisation was the religious socialist Otto Bauer. Orel was able to achieve improvements for his members with the alliance, such as the improvements in trade school education passed by the Landtag of Lower Austria in 1907. When these were to be cancelled in 1909, Orel broke with the CS. The death of Cardinal Archbishop Nagl in 1913 and Pope Pius X in 1914 meant that Orel lost influential supporters from the clergy. He found a collaborator and sponsor for his press work in Marie Henrieta Chotek. In 1913, Orel founded the Allied Catholic Youth of Austria, in which youth organisations of all languages of the Habsburg Monarchy were to be united, but this was prevented by the outbreak of the First World War. At the outbreak of the war, the Orel movement had 171 German-speaking associations with almost 6,000 members, which were united with Czech youth organisations with over 25,000 members.

After the war and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Orel founded the German-Austrian People's Party on 16 November 1918. The party called for a reorganisation of society along the lines of the medieval estate system. However, it was politically unsuccessful and disbanded in 1922. Orel founded the Karl Vogelsang League to propagate his ideas and rejoined the Christian Social Party (CS), which sent him to the Vienna City Council from 1923 to 1925. However, his anti-capitalism led to repeated conflicts with the party and he was expelled from the CS as early as October 1924 due to his deviations from the party line. For Orel, the loss of his mandate signalled the end of his involvement in active politics.

Orel now turned his attention to his great work Oeconomia perennis. In it, he attempted to work out a continuous anti-capitalist tradition of the Catholic Church and to substantiate a church ban on interest that is still valid today. He also published the magazine Das Neue Volk from 1924 to 1936. After he was prevented from presenting his views at the "Katholisch-Soziale Tagung" (Catholic Social Conference) in 1929, he founded the "Studienrunde katholischer Soziologen" (Study Group of Catholic Sociologists), which was to exist until March 1938 and in which renowned academics were involved. Oeconomia perennis was published without a church imprimatur, which earned him a public reprimand from the Episcopal Conference in 1931, which declared the work a "forbidden book".

From 1934, Orel criticised the Christian "corporative state" that was being established, accusing the government of abusing the "true idea of the estates". He tried in vain to create a "Catholic-Austrian social movement" to counter the grievances he criticised. When he demanded a radical cleansing of public life in Das Neue Volk in April 1936 as a reaction to the Phönix scandal, the magazine was banned by the government.

During the National Socialist era in Austria, he was imprisoned in 1943 for political reasons and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of "re-founding a banned party". He was released in 1944 for health reasons and his imprisonment was suspended until he recovered.

After the war, his 1912 work Judaism, Capitalism, Social Democracy was censored in the Soviet occupation zone. After the re-establishment of the republic, Orel once again tried to help his ideas achieve a breakthrough, but without success. The last years of his life were characterised by illness and financial worries. He transferred the rights to his works to a board of trustees with the task of disseminating his books and ideas. The Anton Orel Society emerged from the board of trustees.

Orel criticised modern society and fought against what he saw as "world-dominating Judaism". He warned against Jewish blood that was supposedly contaminated with hereditary diseases. In 1928, he revived the ritual murder charge in a pamphlet. He propagated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an important text. In the 1930s, Orel published several writings on the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he described as a "German prophet".

The Catholic Social Academy of Austria celebrated Orel as a pioneer of Christian social and cultural reform as late as 1981. He was buried in the Döbling Cemetery.

See also

• Leopold Kunschak

Works

• Der Alkoholismus: Einführung in ein soziales Problem (1908)
• Kapitalismus, Bodenreform und christlicher Sozialismus (1909)
• Judaismus, Kapitalismus, Sozialdemokratie (1912)
• Leos XIII. soziales Werk (1913)
• Das Grundproblem der Kultur (1919; 2 volumes; under the pen name Johannes Aquila)
• Handbuch der christlichen Gesellschaftslehre (1920)
• Der judaistische Weltkrieg und das Kulturprogramm der Volkspartei: Rede (1920)
• Judaismus oder deutsche Romantik? : Rede über d. Kampf d. Judentums gegen d. christlich-deutsche Kultur, geh. auf d. „Tagung deutscher Antisemiten Österreich-Ungarns u. d. Deutschen Reiches“ zu Wien am 13. März 1921 (1921)
• Das Verfassungsmachwerk der „Republik Österreich“ von der Warte der immerwährenden Philosophie aus und im Lichte der Idee, Natur und Geschichte Österreichs geprüft und verworfen (1921)
• Vogelsangs Leben und Lehren. Seine Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftslehre (1922–1923)
• Wilhelm Emmanuel Ketteler, ein Führer zu neuem Leben (1927; 2 volumes)
• Gibt es jüdische Ritualmorde? Eine Sichtg u. Erklärg d. geschichtl. Materials ; Die Prozesse von Trient, Damaskus, Tisza-Eßlár u. Polna (1928)
• Oeconomia perennis : Die Wirtschaftslehre der Menschheitsüberlieferung im Wandel der Zeiten und in ihrer unwandelbaren Bedeutung (1930; 3 volumes; with a letter of introduction by Alois Wiesinger)
• Das Weltantlitz : Eine gemeinverst. Natur-, Kultur-, Religions- u. Geschichtsphilosophie (1933; illustrated with 42 pictures by Joseph von Führich)
• Wahre Ständeordnung : Ihr Geist, Wesen, Wirken ; Grundsätzlich-Praktische Klarstellungen (1934)
• Judaismus, der weltgeschichtliche Gegensatz zum Christentum (1934)

References

• Burghardt, Anton (1967). "Catholic Social Thought in Austria," Social Research, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, pp. 369–82.
• Diamant, Alfred (1959). Austrian Catholics and the Social Question, 1918-1933. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
• Diamant, Alfred (1960). Austrian Catholics and the First Republic, 1918-1934. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Dirsch, Felix (2006). Solidarismus und Sozialethik. Ansätze zur Neuinterpretation einer modernen Strömung der katholischen Sozialphilosophie. Münster: Lit, pp. 178–89.
• Gellott, Laura (1988). "Defending Catholic Interests in the Christian State: The Role of Catholic Action in Austria, 1933-1938," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. LXXIV, No. 4, pp. 571–89.
• Görlich, Ernst Joseph (1952). Anton Orel. Künder christlicher Sozial- und Kulturreform. Eine Festgabe aus Anlaß der Vollendung seines 70. Lebensjahres. Salzburg: Österreichischer Kulturverlag.
• Görlich, Ernst Joseph (1973). "Ein Katholik gegen Dollfuß-Österreich. Das Tagebuch des Sozialreformers Anton Orel". In: Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 26. Wien, pp. 375–415.
• Hagemeister, Michael (2017). Die „Protokolle der Weisen von Zion“ vor Gericht. Der Berner Prozess 1933–1937 und die „antisemitische Internationale“. Zürich: Chronos.
• Reichhold, Ludwig (1990). Anton Orel. Der Kampf um die österreichische Jugend. Wien: Karl-von-Vogelsang-Institut.
• Schmoller, Andreas (2017). "»Rufer in der Wüste« des österreichischen Sozialkatholizismus: Biografische und biografiegeschichtliche Anmerkungen zu Anton Orel," Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. XXX, No. 1, pp. 190–206.
• Wasserman, Janek (2014). "Österreichische Aktion and the New Conservatism." In: Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938. Cornell University Press, pp. 132–57.

External links

• Anton Orel entry at Austria-Forum
• Works by Anton Orel at German National Library