Gerald Stourzh. From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on intellectual history and political thought in Europe and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 396 S. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-77636-1.

Reviewed by Richard Schaefer (Department of History, SUNY Plattsburgh)
Published on H-German (March, 2008)

Back to Basics

In a distinguished career spanning over half a century, Gerald Stourzh has written ten books, co-edited over ten more, and been affiliated with such prestigious institutions as the universities of Chicago, Berlin, and Vienna. This collection is comprised of fifteen previously published essays from various phases of Stourzh's career. Written with laudable clarity and precision, it represents a valuable compendium and introduction to the work of this gifted historian of transatlantic legal and political thought.

The autobiographical essay that introduces the volume helps situate the essays in terms of the guiding themes of Stourzh's career, but also illuminates another fascinating chapter in the postwar "turn to the West" that took root among German-speaking scholars and intellectuals. Though relatively short and tantalizingly brief in its mention of encounters with figures such as Leo Strauss, the autobiographical essay proves interesting reading, especially when read alongside the recent transatlantic reflections of émigré historians such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern. After completing a doctorate in Vienna in 1951, Stourzh traveled to the University of Chicago to work as a research assistant in Hans J. Morgenthau's newly founded Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy. While at Chicago, Stourzh sharpened his already strong research interest in Anglo-American constitutional and political history by pursuing further doctoral study in history and political science. In 1958, he returned to Vienna to help develop a new Foreign Policy Association and found the Austrian Foreign Policy Journal. While in Vienna, he also worked for a brief period in the Austrian Foreign Office. Upon submitting Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy as a Habilitationsschrift in 1962, Stourzh also began teaching a seminar, "The Political Ideas of the American Revolution," at the University of Vienna. In 1964, Stourzh was appointed simultaneously Director of the John F. Kennedy Institute of American Studies and Professor of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin. He returned to Vienna in 1969 to become Professor of Modern History, a post from which he retired in 1997.

Subdivided into four parts, From Vienna to Chicago and Back traverses a variety of topics in American and European history, but from within an admittedly narrow focus: legal and political thought. This resolute focus can be slightly repetitive--certain examples, like Alexis de Tocqueville's observations regarding the revolutionary sundering of the "Great Chain of Being" reappear conspicuously in multiple essays--but the overall effect is a sustained, compelling exploration of the primacy of constitutional and legal history to the modern project. Part 1 sets the tone. Titled "Anglo-American History," it consists of essays from the 1950s in which Stourzh explores the impact of English political thought on the American Revolution and related topics. In the first chapter, Stourzh seeks to complicate the commonplace picture of Benjamin Franklin as an Enlightenment optimist, preferring to see Franklin's commitment to equality as precisely that, a commitment rooted in moral impulses, rather than some blithe outgrowth of "Enlightenment optimism." Chapter 2 reconstructs the influence of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) on pre-revolutionary political discourse in the thirteen colonies. In so doing, Stourzh recalls not only the importance of Blackstone's legalism to the revolutionaries' cause, but the importance of the Glorious Revolution as a touchstone for how the revolutionaries conceived of their situation in legal (rather than in philosophical, that is to say, Lockean) terms. Chapter 3 analyzes, in the manner of Begriffsgeschichte, the evolution of the concept "constitution." With its roots simultaneously in analogies based on nature, and legal terminology adapted from Roman and canon law, "constitution" entered into the lexicon of early modern political thought relatively late, and only received its specific stamp as the "paramount law" during the run-up to the American Revolution. The final chapter in Part 1 is a historiographical treatment of Charles Beard, focusing especially on the evolution of his views on American foreign relations. Originally a seminar paper written in 1952 at the University of Chicago, it unabashedly takes Beard to task for his inability to overcome economic determinism fully, and grasp "adequately the phenomenon of power relationships" (p. 112).

Part 2 consists of seven chapters in which a more mature Stourzh confronts some of the intricacies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Austrian history. Though paying due respect to Carl Schorske and his reappraisal of the culture of the Viennese fin de siècle, Stourzh echoes Steven Beller in scorning the "trendy" rush to study "Vienna 1900" (p. 137). Drawing attention instead to the "supporting conditions" surrounding this profusion of "high culture," Stourzh redirects attention to the institutional structures of the Dual Monarchy. Though smacking somewhat of a case of historical sour grapes, Stourzh makes a powerful case for how legal definitions of autonomy among multiple ethnicities in the Dual Monarchy prioritized group rights over individual ones and set the stage for the subsequent exclusion of Austrian Jews from the body politic. He takes this theme up again in Chapter 6 in an analysis of the politics of "ethnic attribution," reconstructing masterfully the mutation of the liberal right to "confess" membership in a national minority into the state's assumption of the authority to assign ethnicity. Chapter 7 describes in detail the impact of the concept of "national autonomy" on the political comprise reached in the Bukovina in 1909-10, which balanced different national groups in the province and created important conditions for facilitating political compromise. This context proved salient for the efforts of Max Diamant, the galut nationalist whose legal battle to establish a Yiddish theatre Stourzh explores in the following chapter. Chapters 9 and 10 explore the erosion of Jewish faith in the liberal promise of the Dual Monarchy, enshrined as Gleichberechtigung in the "Fundamental Law" of 1867, under the pressures of antisemitism. Though staying true to form by focusing on the legal considerations associated with conversion and mixed marriages, Stourzh is to be complimented in these chapters for going beyond legal sticking points to a nascent grasp of these as lived categories for people like Gustav Mahler and Karl Kraus. Part 2 closes with an interesting chapter on the Soviet withdrawal and Austria's transition to full sovereignty in 1955.

Part 3 consists of three essays in which Stourzh formulates what he proposes as the "Tocquevillian moment" in Western history: the transition from "the paradigm of a gradated society ... [to] the paradigm of equal rights for all human beings" (p. 25). Chapter 12 outlines the pre-existing "reservoirs of equality" that predated and shaped this transition but pays due attention to the ideological and material impediments that stood (and continue) to stand in the way. Chapter 13 traces the Tocquevillian moment back to the "politico-legal culture" of seventeenth-century England, but contrasts the "fundamentalizing of rights" that occurred there with the "constitutionalizing of rights" that occurred in the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The French preference for full legislative sovereignty without constitutional guarantees for the individual rounds out what Stourzh classifies as the three basic models of western democratic government. His claim that each is further embedded in a unique "culture of rights" is a provocative, though underdeveloped, attempt to resist the "reduction of the rule of law ... [to] security or national interest" (p. 334). In chapter 14, Stourzh analyzes the merits and limitations of Democracy in America (1835-40) and affirms Tocqueville as the "great analyst of rather fluid individualistic/egalitarian societies" (p. 352).

Perhaps, it is not entirely unjust that Stourzh celebrates his own ability to have survived the variety of "turns"--he also refers somewhat less generously to "fads and fashions"--that have affected historical studies in the last few decades (p. 3). His own work is a testament to the enduring importance of studying the impact of law on politics, and though not an analyst of discourse in the same way, Stourzh clearly feels himself in the same camp as J. G. A. Pocock and others who helped revive interest in classical political thought. All the same, the single essay in part 4, a post-Christian exploration of the themes of guilt and sin in Albert Camus's The Fall (1956), leaves the reader with an uncanny afterthought. With his obvious affinity for literature, one wonders whether Stourzh might not have benefited from participating more fully in the methodological self-questioning--including the openness to literary theory--that has been a mainstay of intellectual history over the last three decades. Paying due respect to the merits of his back to basics approach, an expanded and more theoretically informed approach to the "culture of rights," from say an anthropological perspective, seems apposite to his aim of reawakening our historical sensibilities to the importance of politico-legal categories.

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Citation: Richard Schaefer. Review of Stourzh, Gerald, From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on intellectual history and political thought in Europe and America. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14336

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