The article argues for the thesis that the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil (1880-1942) may be read as an exemplary kind of social theorist, a philosopher and critic of European civilization who exploits the literary devices of irony, ambivalence and aesthetic distance in order to communicate a particular style of thinking about the social conditions, movements, ideologies and contradictory identities of modernity that could not otherwise be expressed in the abstract discursive language of social science. The article explores a number of respects in which Musil’s writing can be seen as ironizing our frequent perception of modernity as dominated by the evils of alienation, anonymity, fragmentation and occupational specialization, by exposing the extent to which this perception expresses elements of naïvety and complacency inherent in classical European humanistic discourses centring on values of Bildung and the ‘many-sided personality’.
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