Thinkers Timeline

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher. Many consider him the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, Austria, into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a powerful steel industrialist. His mother was a gifted musician. The family home was visited by composers like Brahms and Mahler. Three of his brothers died by suicide. Ludwig was first trained as an engineer in Berlin and Manchester, where he worked on aeroplane design. While studying, he became fascinated by the foundations of mathematics. In 1911 he travelled to Cambridge to work with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised his genius. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought bravely and was decorated. While at the front and in a prisoner-of-war camp, he wrote his first book. That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921. He believed it had solved all the major problems of philosophy. He gave away his vast inherited fortune and became a primary school teacher in remote Austrian villages. He also designed an austere house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, having decided his earlier work contained serious mistakes. He spent the rest of his life developing a very different philosophy. He served as a hospital porter during the Second World War. He died of prostate cancer in Cambridge on 29 April 1951, aged 62. His last words to his housekeeper were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life.'

Friedrich Hayek was an economist and political thinker. He was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1899 and died in 1992. His full name was Friedrich August von Hayek. Hayek grew up in a Europe that was about to change violently. He served briefly in the First World War as a young man. Afterwards he studied at the University of Vienna, where he was part of a group of economists known as the 'Austrian School'. In 1931 Hayek moved to Britain to teach at the London School of Economics. There he became the main rival of John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the age. The two men disagreed deeply about how economies work. In 1944 Hayek published 'The Road to Serfdom', a warning that government planning of the economy could lead to the loss of political freedom. The book made him famous far beyond economics. After the war he worked in the United States and later in Germany. For many years Hayek's ideas were out of fashion. Then, in the 1970s, they returned to influence. He shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In the 1980s political leaders in Britain and the United States drew on his thinking. Hayek lived long enough to see his ideas move from the margins to the centre of debate.

Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics. He was born in 1902 in Vienna into a well-off, secular Jewish family that had converted to Lutheran Christianity. His parents loved books, and Popper grew up reading widely. As a young man he tried out many of the big intellectual movements of his time. He attended Marxist meetings, studied Freudian psychology, and worked briefly with the Adlerian school of psychology. He was struck by something that bothered him for the rest of his life. The followers of these movements seemed able to explain everything. Whatever happened in the world, Marxism, Freudianism, and Adlerian theory could fit it into their system. Popper began to wonder whether this was a strength or a weakness. He trained as a teacher and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1928. In 1934 he published his first major book, Logic of Scientific Discovery, which made his name in philosophy of science. As Hitler rose to power, Popper, with his Jewish background, knew he had to leave Europe. In 1937 he took a teaching post in New Zealand. There, during the Second World War, he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, his great defence of liberal democracy. In 1946 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He was knighted in 1965. He wrote on philosophy of science, politics, the mind, and many other subjects. He died in 1994 in London at the age of 92.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He is widely considered the greatest logician of the 20th century. His incompleteness theorems changed how mathematicians and philosophers understand the foundations of mathematics. He was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic). His parents were ethnic Germans living in a mostly Czech city. His father managed a textile factory. The family was comfortable. Young Kurt was a quiet, curious child. He asked so many questions that his family nicknamed him 'Mr. Why'. He suffered through a serious illness with rheumatic fever at age six, which he believed had permanently damaged his heart, even though doctors found no lasting damage. The belief shaped his fearful approach to his own health for the rest of his life. He studied at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. He attended the famous Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met to discuss the foundations of knowledge. He earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1929. The next year, he proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorems. He was 24. In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism made Vienna dangerous. Gödel was not Jewish but had Jewish friends and colleagues. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and the start of World War II, he and his wife Adele fled to America. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also worked. The two became close friends. Gödel did important later work in cosmology and philosophy. He died in 1978 of malnutrition. He had become so paranoid about poisoning that he stopped eating after his wife was hospitalised.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.