His radical anti-liberal and anti-socialist views, based on early 19th century Romantic ideas expressed by Adam Müller et al. and popularized in his books and lecture courses, helped antagonise political factions in Austria during the interwar years.

By the end of 1904 Spann, along with Hermann Beck and Hanns Dorn founded a newspaper called "Critical Pages for the whole Social Sciences".

When he recovered he was first a commander of a company of Russian prisoners and then until later in 1918 he was given a position on the "scientific committee for wartime economy" with the war Ministry in Vienna.

[citation needed] In 1919, at the instigation of the Austrian Minister of Education Emerich Czermak, he was appointed full professor of economics and social studies at the University of Vienna, where he was supposed to form a philosophical counter-position to Austro-Marxism.

With the appointment of Spann, the Christian-social teaching administration aimed to create an ideological bulwark against Austrian social democracy and Bolshevism.

The anti-democratic and anti-Marxist ideas propagated in it were particularly popular with German nationalist and conservative Catholic student groups in Austria and the Sudetenland and he quickly rose to a cult figure.

[4] Spann was popular with students, not only for his lectures which would spill out into the hallways at the University, but also for mid-summer festivals which he would hold in the woods where he would teach that "the ability to intuit essences was nurtured by jumping over the fire..." (Caldwell 2004, 138-9) Defunct In 1928 he also became a board member of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfdK).The first public event of the Kampfbund took place on February 23, 1929 in the auditorium maximum of the University of Munich, where he gave a speech about the cultural crisis of the present, which was well received in the media at the time.

[10] Repeatedly, Spann tried to draw the ruling powers' attention to his authoritarian theory of a corporate state, which he thought should be introduced immediately for the benefit of all.

[20] Although to a large degree in tune with the Zeitgeist, he repeatedly met with disapproval until, in 1938, right after the Anschluss, he was briefly imprisoned by the Nazis and eventually barred from his professorship at the University of Vienna, which he had held since 1919.

As an intellectual living and working in Austria, he only played a limited role in the formation and development of the Conservative Revolution, but his thinking also helped shape its main protagonists such as Edgar Julius Jung.

[24] Karl Bruckschwaiger (2005) assigns Othmar Spann's thinking to the Conservative Revolution, as defined in Rolf Peter Sieferle's work.

[25] The universalists around Spann are assigned to the socio-romantic currents within political Catholicism, all of which represented "more or less backward-looking, oriented towards romanticism, feudalism and urban economy" views.

[26] Jonas Hagedorn (2016) emphasizes that Spann's authoritarian-corporatist model of society is only one of a total of three variants of corporatism represented by political Catholicism.

In sharp contrast to anti-democratic and centralist universalism were the variants of free corporatism, represented by the Catholic socialists in the social-democratic concept of economic democracy and by the solidarists.

​​Emmerich Tálos (2013) attests Spann to have “theoretically underpinned the criticism of the parliamentary representative system and of the parties as well as the efforts made in connection with the economic crisis to find an authoritarian solution for mediating state and social interests.” Universalism has not been implemented in Austria in terms of realpolitik, but has "contributed significantly" to the content of the estate discussion.

[32] Spann's close associate Walter Heinrich became head of the federal organization of the Austrian Home Guard in 1930 and is considered the author of the Korneuburg Oath.

Heinrich founded the Comradeship Association for national and socio-political education (KB), through which Spann's teachings decisively shaped the political movement of the Sudeten Germans before 1938.

Spann, especially in his book The True State, developed the idea of an authoritarian and largely static organization of a corporate society directed against parliamentary democracy and the labor movement alike.

The estates, which were conceived as compulsory professional organizations, were given extensive state sovereign rights and the workers were subject to the rule of the "business leaders".

In relation to his biography, the historian and ÖVP politician Geraldario regards Spann as an atypical representative of the Austrian intelligentsia in the 20th century: “He had resisted being taken over by the corporate state and the Nazi dictatorship, but despite the physical injuries he suffered in the concentration camp impairments – he was considered persona non grata in the Second Republic.