This book's title speaks to its author's intellectual, as well as personal, itineraries. Spending the better part of the 1950s as a doctoral student and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, the Austrian-born Gerald Stourzh cultivated a serious interest in the political and intellectual origins of American democratic pluralism. His work on Benjamin Franklin's political thought established him early on as an influential historian in this field. Upon his return to Austria, Stourzh devoted himself to serious study of the legal and constitutional history of the late Habsburg Empire, with a particular focus on the intersection between the development of the Rechtsstaat, the movement toward the institutionalization of equal legal rights for all imperial subjects, and the potentially contradictory trend toward the ascription of membership in ethnonational communities as a juridically defined attribute of individual identity.

What emerges from this collection of Stourzh's essays selected from over five decades of publication is a sense of how the shifting historical and geographical contexts in which he has lived, and his lifelong concern with issues of social justice, have molded his research and writing.

One of the most potent factors clearly shaping Stourzh's work is his personal background as an Austrian part of whose childhood was spent under Hitler's Greater German Reich and whose parents took a dim view of the Nazi regime's racist and totalitarian ideology. A theme that recurs persistently in his writing is the central importance of Jewish legal status as a litmus test for the quality of Western societies' respect for the principles of human rights and civic equality. The emancipation of the Jews in many parts of nineteenth-century Europe, the treatment of American Jews as respected citizens rather than a tolerated minority from the very establishment of the United States—these developments are recognized by Stourzh as watershed moments in the movement of Euro-Atlantic civilization away from a rigidly hierarchical society based on the fixed attribution of social status and toward the liberal-democratic ideal of equality for all under the law.

To be sure, Stourzh recognizes that the course of liberalization did not run along a smoothly Whiggish path of history. The abomination of slavery and racism in the United States and the disenfranchisement of women on both sides of the Atlantic remained in place for far too long after the principle of human equality had been invoked by the American and French revolutions. And in Central Europe, progress toward political liberalism was disrupted by the rise of chauvinistic forms of nationalism that culminated in the Nazis' institutionalization of a new, racialized social hierarchy, with all the attendant evils that followed.

In Stourzh's view, one of the ironic sources of this development can be traced to the Habsburg regime's well-meaning efforts, over the last half-century of its existence, to accommodate rising ethnic nationalism by granting quasi-corporate status to linguistically defined nationalities within the borders of Cisleithanian Austria. Early efforts to rely on subjective self-definition as the basis for ethnonational categorization among Czechs and Germans in Bohemia were undermined by problems of political manipulation and mutual charges of false representation. A series of court decisions led toward a much more inflexibly ascriptive system of identification. Rational as this shift may have been within the terms of the Habsburg nationalities policy's own logic, Stourzh sees in this development a fatal move away from the enlightened ideal of a state that refuses to distinguish among its citizens on the basis of rigidly defined, “objective” attributes. By the same token, he recognizes the potential promise of the complex compromises worked out by the Habsburgs among the nationalities of Moravia, Bukovina, and Galicia in the final years before the outbreak of the Great War that led to the empire's dissolution.

It is above all to the English and American political traditions that Stourzh looks as models of tolerance and liberal democracy. By the late seventeenth century, England's political system, as he interprets it, had come to rest on the premise that the Crown-in-Parliament exercised its sovereignty by virtue of its capacity and readiness to protect and uphold the equality of Englishmen's individual rights and the sanctity of their liberties. Even a nominally conservative thinker such as William Blackstone strongly implied in his writings that, in extremis, the wanton abuse of its sovereignty by the Crown-in-Parliament could legitimately be countered by revolution. And the American Revolution can best be understood, Stourzh suggests, as a conservative revolution in defense of these fundamental principles. It was the Founding Fathers of the United States who then took political liberalism one crucial step further by formally framing the principles of equal treatment under the law in a constitutional form. As a European who grew up under the tyranny of Hitler and the subsequent Allied occupation of Austria, and whose trans-Atlantic intellectual development took its course under the shadow of the Cold War, Gerald Stourzh has a Tocquevillean appreciation for the merits, as well as potential pitfalls, of America's path to democracy. Clearly and unabashedly adopting a tone of moral advocacy, he sees the constitutional enshrining of equal rights and protection of civil liberties as ideals that all societies—including American society—should strive to approximate.

As some of these essays suggest, Stourzh also sees in Christianity's emphasis on the spiritual equality of all humans one of the fundamental sources of inspiration for modern secular liberalism's respect for legal and political equality. Although fully cognizant of how far institutionalized Christianity strayed from this ideal over the course of much of its history, Stourzh seems to overlook a more fundamental contradiction. The Catholic tradition he invokes offers an equal chance of salvation for all, provided they accept the fundamental tenets of Christian doctrine. Intolerance for religious diversity and for rational skepticism hence forms a cornerstone of Christianity's universalistic inclusiveness, and this is one of the reasons why the separation between church and state was such a crucial stage on Western society's path toward a more genuinely egalitarian sociopolitical structure.

In his discussion of conversions to Christianity among Vienna's fin-de-siècle Jewish intellectual and professional elites, Stourzh bends over backward to explain and excuse the trajectories that led individuals such as Gustav Mahler and Karl Kraus away from Judaism. He goes so far as to designate as “noble” (240 and ff.) what he surmises was Kraus's motive for conversion: namely, his desire to contribute to the absorption of future generations of Jews into their Christian surroundings, hence sparing them the continued disabilities and distortions of their existence as an ethnoreligious minority. But to depict one's personal discomfort with, and abandonment of, the cultural tradition of one's origins as an expression of selfless concern for the future generations of one's former community is a position more suggestive of conceit and hypocrisy than of nobility. In any case, a society that achieves tolerance of ethnic diversity only at the price of religious conformity can be considered to have fallen considerably short of any meaningful pluralistic ideal, as Stourzh would surely be the first to acknowledge.

It must be emphasized that Stourzh is at pains to recognize that the social and economic pressures under which Vienna's Jewish elites labored were such as to make sincere conversions very difficult to distinguish from opportunistic changes of faith. More generally, his writings reflect a deeply engaged, one might say soul-searching, effort to discern where it was that European society went astray in the course of its political liberalization and what sorts of constructive lessons can be drawn from the successes and failures of the Western historical experience. The intellectual originality and meticulous scholarship of the essays in this book attest to Gerald Stourzh's continuing importance as a comparative historian of incomparably deep erudition and unsurpassed dedication to responsible and morally informed scholarship.