Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture is a 1979 transdisciplinary nonfiction book written by cultural historian Carl E. Schorske and published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.[1] Described by its publisher as a "magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born,"[2] the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

[3] The book is lavishly illustrated with both color and black-and-white reproductions of key artworks, referenced in the text which explains their relevance to the themes in question.

In the 'Introduction' the author claims that the text was born from his desire 'to construct a course in European intellectual history, designed to help students to understand the large, architectonic correlations between high culture and socio-political change' (p. XVIII).

The chronologically compressed and socially circumscribed character of the Viennese experience created a more coherent context for studying the different ramifications of its high culture (p. XXVI).

The second essay, "The Ringstrasse, its critics, and the birth of urban modernism" looks back to explore the liberal cultural system in its ascendancy through the medium of urban form and architectural style ... but it looks forward too … to the critical responses on the part of two leading participants in it — Otto Wagner and Camillo Sitte — reveal the emergence of conflicting tendencies, communitarian and functionalist, in modern thought about the built environment (p. XXVIII).