Gerald Stourzh has long inhabited the odd world of Europeans who write about American history. It is customary for these scholars to be bemused about audiences. Do they write for Americans or for their local cultures? Do they explain the United States to Americans? The Americans to Europeans? Europeans to themselves by comparative analysis with the United States? The strategy has varied over the years. Fifty years ago, at least in Britain, it was mostly a matter of explaining to the British how the United States worked, by way of demystifying American power; this was how Denis Brogan mostly wrote. Twenty-five years ago, the local audience slipped from view and British historians of the United States became more anxious to appear in the Journal of American History than the Times Literary Supplement and were keener to be published by Harvard University Press than by Victor Gollancz.

This collection of Stourzh's essays shows a different pattern, perhaps because it covers more than fifty years and is much formed by central European culture. Stourzh was born in Austria in 1929, took his doctorate on Austrian history at the University of Vienna in 1951, and then undertook postdoctoral work on American history at the University of Chicago, before he returned to Europe in 1958. After a stint in Berlin, he taught at the University of Vienna until his retirement. In some ways, this movement (going away, returning) was a typical pattern for the generation which came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. However, many stopped writing about their local historical culture after taking up American themes, even if they went home. Less typically, Stourzh has remained amphibious, sometimes writing about the United States, sometimes about Austria and Austria–Hungary, occasionally in a comparative vein. Hence, after an autobiographical introduction, this book has three sections which correspond to these preoccupations. (There is a fourth on ‘the human condition’, but it has only one essay, on Albert Camus.) The first section has essays on Benjamin Franklin's conflicted relationship to the Enlightenment, on how some Americans read William Blackstone as offering sanction to revolution, on the crystallization of the terms ‘constitution’ and ‘constitutional’ in the eighteenth century, and (somewhat isolated) on Charles Beard's late views on American foreign policy. The second section is longer with seven essays, mostly concerned with how the Austro–Hungarian Empire handled the nationality problem. The third section has three essays chiefly about modern concepts of rights understood in a Tocquevillean framework.

For the most part, the book works very well. As autobiography, perhaps it is too stately to be very absorbing. Stourzh seems to be a man of grave and abundant courtesy, whose life has been spent amid masterful mentors (Hans Morgenthau, Ralph Lerner, Ernst Fraenkel), brilliant students (Willi Paul Adams), and definitive works of scholarship. Scarcely a book is mentioned which is not praised. For Stourzh, intellectual generations seem exquisitely reciprocal, hardly ever at war. This is a voice much at odds with the Anglo–American tradition, which likes gossip and the knife in the back. And it is a voice which seems to come from a very distant time and place, when and where professors were oracular.

Of the three sections, the first has the oldest pieces – two from the 1950s, one from 1970, another from 1988. For the most part, they have worn well: the essays on Franklin and Blackstone are elegant and precise, that on Beard perhaps a little murky, but the essay on the idea of constitutionality makes a very compelling case for the American Revolution as the inventor of the modern tradition. The third section is more ambitious, in that it roams from the ancient world, to the middle ages, to modernity in order to interrogate how liberal democracy and equal rights have emerged, but it feels thinly stretched and is less persuasive. The second section on Austria seems by far the strongest by being more learned, more passionate, and more consequential. This response may arise from the fact that I know very little Austro-Hungarian history, so much came as a revelation to me. But I was fascinated by Stourzh's careful explanations of how the Austrians tried to manage their multinational state, by inventing constitutional devices of dazzling ingenuity and bizarre thoroughness, which from the late nineteenth century led them deeper and deeper into indefensible contradictions. Scholars and proponents of American multiculturalism would do well to study what Stourzh here explicates, for he starkly shows how the fluidity of cultures can make a nonsense of efforts to ground the state in culture. He especially shows how the impulse to encourage culture can end as a prescription hostile to individualism. As Stourzh puts it: ‘The new and increasing primacy of the ethnic groups tended not merely to deemphasize the traditional role of the provinces and of the imperial government; this primacy also tended to reduce the position of the individual as citizen of the state, stressing, instead, the individual's role as a member of an ethnic group’ (p. 153). For, if everyone was presumed to belong, everyone was obliged to belong – whether they wished it or not, whether as square pegs they had any desire to be fitted into round holes. And, as Stourzh shows in the case of Austrian Jews, by this logic it became thereby easier to rule some groups as beyond belonging, even in a fissiparous political structure. For much of this book Stourzh is politely descriptive. But on these Austrian topics he achieves a telling sadness about the savage ironies of unintended consequences, and his book gains thereby in intellectual force.