| Reviews | The History Teacher, 41.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America, by Gerald Stourzh. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 384 pages. $45.00, cloth.

It is an indication of the impressive breadth of this collection, comprised of previously published essays largely focused on political thought, that among the most compelling chapters are the introductory autobiographical sketch and the closing analysis of Albert Camus' The Fall. Perhaps it is sufficient to note that Gerald Stourzh is best known among historians of early America for two well-received volumes written in the 1950s on Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton (the latter unpublished until 1970), but spent the majority of his career at the University of Vienna where his reputation has rested on his research in Austrian history and politics. Stourzh's emphasis on the "primacy of politics"—clear in these pieces—is rooted, he says, in his boyhood experience in Nazi-era Vienna, an experience which led him to reject "the many 'turns,' not to mention fashions and fads within the discipline of history and the humanities" over the last few decades (p. 3). No references to Jacques Derrida here. Even so, this is an extraordinarily cosmopolitan collection, informed by what can only be described as capacious humanistic values.

Stourzh's early essays on American history—from a fascinating assertion of William Blackstone's influence on the American Revolution, to a counterintuitive reading of Benjamin Franklin's Enlightenment thought, to a perceptive analysis of Charles Beard's work on American foreign policy—retain freshness and remain profitable reading.

Stourzh's outstanding later essay on the transformation, during the American Revolution, of the meaning of "Constitution" from sovereign government to fundamental law which superseded government rightly identifies this as "the great innovation and achievement of American eighteenth-century constitutionalism" (p. 98). This point is not new, but it nicely informs Stourzh's exploration of what he calls the "Tocquevillian Moment," when societies based on status became societies based on rights. And, indeed, a consistent theme throughout many of these essays is what Stourzh calls the "constitutionalization" of equal human rights—where the equal status of all citizens vis a vis the state is elevated "above the power and competence of the normal legislator to change or abolish" (p. 293, 318).

Stourzh is particularly sensitive to the tenuous nature of rights in the absence of such constitutionalization, and decries what he calls "the ethnicizing of Austrian politics" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the emphasis on the individual's membership in an ethnic group tended over time to diminish the importance of that person's citizenship in the state (p. 153). In a brilliant essay on the trajectory of "Ethnic Attribution in Late Imperial Austria," Stourzh describes how the Austrian law defining ethnic membership came to subordinate the subjective claims of the individual to a more rigid system in which state authorities could settle ethnic attribution "on the basis of objective indications" (p. 167). Stourzh does not address the underlying problematic assumption that all people have a single, essential ethnic identity that must shape their character and fix their life-choices—assumptions which some of the "fashions and fads" that have attracted historians have rightly questioned. And he is not entirely skeptical about the possibilities for "peaceful coexistence among various peoples" in multiethnic states which recognize ethnic autonomy (he describes such an experiment in the interwar Bukovina as "a model"). But he is keenly sensitive to the potential evils of privileging ethnicity over the equal rights conferred by citizenship (p. 189). Accordingly, a number of these pieces focus on the heritage of liberalism's emphasis on equal rights for individuals—including the 1867 Austrian "Fundamental Law on the General Rights of the Citizens," which granted civil and political equality to Jews in the empire.

Stourzh endorses Karl Renner's assertion that law, not nature, makes human beings equal, and devotes quite a number of these essays to the heritage of legal equality. Stourzh recognizes that procedural equality can mask or even reinforce certain kinds of substantive inequality; that the law itself, as E.P. Thompson and others have argued, frequently legitimizes class distinctions. But he maintains that a commitment to equal rights has, over time, democratized liberal societies "that were not, at the outset, democratic at all," creating cultures which value justice and the pursuit of "an ever more perfect equality" as a "social norm." Too, the fundamental importance of procedural equality can be measured, he suggests, by the grim potential of its absence, as when the Austrian law granting equality to Jews was abolished in 1934. Equal rights, not "constitutionalized," were abandoned to the Nazi view that "the Jew is no human being" (pp. 300–301, 349).

Stourzh does not hesitate to condemn evil, and he ends this collection with a sensitive treatment of Camus' The Fall, arguing that "naïve innocence" about human nature is an "evasion of responsibility" (pp. 363–64). But the only "unforgivable sin," he says, is the rejection of grace—the "presumption" of "irremediable depravity" into which Camus' anti-hero Clamence has fallen. The "essence of evil," then, is the "persistence in corruption and self-contempt" which follows "the refusal of a second chance" (p. 369).

Stourzh himself regrets that he has "not written one or two books more (and perhaps a few articles less)," but this fine collection makes a virtue of this "mistake" (hardly the "unforgivable sin"). Though several individual essays might be accessible to advanced undergraduates, the breadth of the volume will limit its classroom use. But it will be an inspiration to scholars and teachers in various fields and disciplines.


University of Alabama at Birmingham	Brian Steele

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.