The second volume of Derek Beales's definitive biography of Joseph II concludes the extraordinary project begun with the publication of the first volume, Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780, in 1987. Taken as a whole, this biography is not just the seminal work on Joseph, but also represents some of the very best historical research published on eighteenth-century Habsburg and European history.

Joseph has always remained a difficult figure for both historians and students. He is generally grouped among the enlightened rulers like his contemporaries Catherine and Frederick, but his fraught relationship as coruler with Empress Maria Theresa and the complicated history of his frenetic decade of sole rulership and its results have made him harder to pin down. It is precisely this last decade of his life, during which Joseph sought so desperately to bring plans he had pursued and argued for to fruition that is the focus of this second volume of Beales's biography. The volume is organized roughly chronologically, to give a narrative to Joseph's last decade, but Beales switches among the different contexts of the empire to keep in focus the enormous realm within which Joseph's ideas about toleration, unified government, church reform, and military power played out. The task is made even more challenging by the nature of the subject, namely the person of Joseph himself: contradictory, self-dramatizing, capable of prodigious work, famously prickly, and hamstrung by both his circumstances and his own personality.

For all its manifest strengths, this is not a volume for the casual reader, but that is not to say that it is slow reading. On the contrary, Beales's style is engaging and clear. But the volume delves deeply not just into Joseph's life and the court around him, but also elucidates in great depth the intricate development of policy and focuses on the interplay between the international and domestic arenas. This is therefore far more than a biography of Joseph. Indeed, Beales is successful in making this an imperial story that runs, as it should, from the Brabant to the Hungarian latifundia, a diverse realm that Joseph tried so hard to centralize and rationalize. Beales has delved into sources across Europe and in the best possible sense has been dogged in pursuing the veracity of sources and providing an intellectual and methodological blueprint for anyone writing a rigorous, academically grounded biography. As a result, for students and scholars of eighteenth-century Europe, this volume is a treasure trove of bibliographic information and Beales has made an enormous effort to pursue sources, clarify the document record, and thus challenge the accepted wisdom regarding Joseph in both his domestic and international milieus.

Beales does not shy away from a critical view, but strives to acknowledge both the truly remarkable as well as the tragic in Joseph. As Beales writes in the penultimate chapter, “There have already been several moments in his career when a biographer can only look on in exasperation at what seem to be his manifestly foolish decisions” (p. 592). The tragedy involves the failures of Joseph's rule, but also the lost possibility for achieving a new political reality that Joseph himself envisioned: a state of tolerance, prosperity, efficiency, and relatively open, if still limited, public discourse—achievable in Joseph's view only with the exercise of his own uncontested power and a reinvigorated conception of absolutist authority. As Beales makes clear in multiple chapters, Joseph's policies in religious matters, censorship, cultural patronage, judicial reform, attitudes toward state institutions, and other areas demonstrated the same ambivalence and contradictions of Joseph himself—at times both liberal-minded and despotic. Beales demonstrates in both volumes of the biography Joseph's unfortunate success in driving away potential political and personal support. In assessing the dogged determination of Joseph in the face of illness and increasing opposition and unrest, Beales captures the puzzle and fascination of Joseph for historians, writing, “Yet he set forth on a collision course, reviving and exacerbating almost every possible grievance in every province. One can only wonder at the dedication and willpower of the dying emperor in his desperate campaign to bring his policies to fruition. It was magnificent, but it was not politics” (p. 593).

Although this is, of course, a biography of Joseph, one of its strengths is the way that Beales weaves together the personality and personal narrative of Joseph with the larger canvas of European culture and politics. Beales peoples not just the court, but also the international arena of this decade of Joseph's rule with the personalities Joseph confronted and often affronted, from his family to Viennese high society to the pope. Beales takes on the challenging question of the context and motivation for Joseph's ideas and policies and the degree to which Joseph voiced and worked for a new political order and understanding. Likewise, Joseph's attitudes toward the censorship regime and the government's need to shape and control public discourse and behavior (and whether both changed at the end of the decade in the face of political unrest) occupy an important part of Beales's narrative, as does the experience of church reform and the forms of tolerance in the eighteenth century. Certainly Joseph's struggles and his failures were related to his constant efforts to make the constituent parts of his realm other than he found them.

The biography thus clarifies where we can place Joseph II in our narratives of eighteenth-century conceptions of power, reform, and enlightenment. Trying to nail down Joseph's political and religious influences remains problematic, and Beales frankly acknowledges the gaps and problems in the record, while providing possibilities and context for the emergence of Joseph's ideas, particularly his commitment to establishing political and administrative uniformity in the empire. Joseph's restless search for cohesion and a rational state order, his ideas about military power and military reform, his attitudes toward traditional elites and institutions, and the degree to which Joseph's policies continued those of his mother as well as lasted past his untimely demise are important contributions of this work. Importantly, Beales strips away misconceptions about Joseph—including those that made him more radical than he was. If Beales does not endeavor to soften the hard edges of Joseph, he does seek to give him credit for great and small achievements, including rejecting the picture of Joseph as a “musical ignoramus and curmudgeonly skinflint” (p. 475). As Beales implies in his conclusions, in terms of the impact of a sovereign on his people, Joseph more than deserves the appellate of “great” so readily accorded his contempories. In sum, no one should believe they fully understand eighteenth-century Habsburg or European politics until they have read Beales's two volumes on Joseph II.