This volume is a monumental undertaking. For that and for his valuable introduction to the volume, the editor, Iván Zoltán Dénes, deserves a great deal of credit. His attention to the ambiguous relationship between liberalism and nationalism is the historically appropriate approach. Generally, during the first half of the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism were mutually reinforcing; but by the second half of the century—and increasingly by the twentieth century—the concept of national unity could and did come into conflict with the liberal idea of pluralism, as did nationalist exclusivity with the idea of liberal tolerance. At the same time, the relationship between liberalism and nationalism was, by its very ambiguity, replete with bewildering variations and subtle nuances; and the rich and diverse material of the essays in the book seems to prove this point. Dénes, rather than acknowledging that, tends toward simplification, explicating mutually exclusive dichotomies such as, in the liberals' case, constitutionalism versus absolutism, progress versus backwardness, patriotism versus (often) loyalty to the empire, opinion versus prejudice (4). Certainly, liberals were for constitutions and against absolutism; but they also were, in Hungary and Poland for instance, for the preservation of many, though not all, of the noble privileges (at least until 1848 in Hungary), and generally their patriotism ran parallel with loyalty to their monarchs.

Dénes sketches the complicated relationship between liberalism and nationalism correctly, but occasionally his tendency to cut through complexity and to make categorical statements undercuts his analysis. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberals did not become the party of modernity everywhere. Perhaps this was true in Great Britain, but certainly not—or not consistently—in Italy, Hungary, and Romania. By the same token, not all liberals—including those in Great Britain—were against all privileges in the nineteenth century. And back in the eighteenth century, not all German, Hungarian, and Italian intellectuals repudiated national traditions, nor were most German liberals against enlightened absolutism at that time.

David McCrone's essay on Scotland and England is informative, but he makes too much of Scottish emulation of England. After all, Scotland did have its own strong social, religious, and educational traditions, which figured in the evolution of the glorious Scottish Enlightenment. Emulation was also hindered by what Linda Colley, in Britons Forging the Nation: 1707–1837, called “fear, contempt or even open violence when they [the English and the Scots] encountered each other” (New Haven, 1992, 117–18). Richard Finley's essay, also on Scotland, is very good, especially in depicting the adjustment of Scottish nationalism to Great Britain and contrasting Scottish and Irish nationalisms in the Victorian age.

The essays by Henk Te Velde on Dutch, Janet Polasky on Belgian, Gabor Erdody on German, and Albert Tanner on Swiss liberalism and nationalism are among the best in the volume. Te Velde places his discussion in a comparative historical framework and brings the similarities between British and Dutch liberalisms to the fore. Simultaneously he also emphasizes the particularities of the Dutch case. Polasky guides her essay masterfully toward the “crescendo” of Belgian liberal nationalism, the declaration of constitutional independence in 1830. The crux of Gabor Erdody's essay is the ignominious defeat and subordination of liberalism to nationalism in a united Germany after 1871. In that particular case, it would have been useful had Erdody pointed out that such subordination was most likely in light of the dominant Prussian tradition, built on the conservative notions of power and hierarchical order. Albert Tanner's essay is a wonderful piece of writing and is by far the very best in the volume.

Vimos Heszler's essay, on the other hand, is still a weak one, although he had made efforts to improve on it in a previous version. The major problems lie in his presentist vision and in his lack of understanding of the Habsburg monarchy. It is totally anachronistic to write that “the only integrative force that might have brought the different nations of the empire together was a kind of solidarity between suppressed peoples” (140), and his insistence that the monarchy was held together only by force and inertia (141) reflects, at best, only part of what had transpired. Because it was a dynastic-administrative and not a nationalistic concept, Josephinism did not emphasize the supremacy of the Germans (141). Finally, though liberalism indeed declined by the early twentieth century in Austria, to say that “it ceased to exist” (149) is an exaggeration.

Iván Zoltán Dénes's essay on the Hungarian liberals and conservatives is a good and scholarly summary of what is known in Hungarian historiography as the “Age of Reform” in the first half of the nineteenth century. The problem lies in the author's attempt to round up the story and make connections to later periods. After 1867 the victorious liberals co-opted the conservatives who ceased to have an independent political existence after the 1870s. Dénes claims that a legend emerged about them in the 1870s. I find this highly unlikely considering their general unpopularity. Also, to speak about the liberal system being discredited in Hungary (189) was a point of view that only a minority held at the time, and it became a widely held opinion only in hindsight.

Three excellent essays follow the previous one: the first by Miklos Szabo on liberalism in Hungary, the second by Maciej Janowski on the same in Poland, and the third by Otto Urban on Czech liberalism and nationalism. It is tragic that the book was published in 2000 after the premature death of Miklos Szabo, one of Hungary's most original and learned intellectual historians. The one problem I see in Urban's essay is his overemphasis on exclusively Czech developments. Bohemia was a multiethnic province, divided between Czechs and Germans, and to isolate the first from the other gives the essay a somewhat artificial quality.

Miklos Kun's and Alexander Semyonov's essays on liberalism in tsarist Russia reflect the country's tragic fate as it was ground down between the vastly more powerful forces of official autocracy and popular indifference or outright hostility. Inasmuch as there was modernization in Russia, that tradition, as Semyonov reminds us, was “at odds with the liberal values of individual freedom and social initiative” (332). The book concludes with three very good essays by Imre Reiss on Serbian liberalism, by Diana Mishkova on liberalism in the Balkans, and by Eyup Ozveren on the development of liberalism and nationalism in the Ottoman Empire and then in Turkey. All in all Liberty and the Search for Identity is highly valuable, making an essential contribution to our knowledge and understanding not only of the complex interrelationship between liberalism and nationalism but also of certain historical periods and national histories.