How could the nineteenth century be understood in historiographical terms? This book takes what is recognizably the terminology of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) and calls it the “long century” that consisted of the Age of Revolution and the Age of Empire. It began in 1789 with the French Revolution and ended in 1914 with the start of World War I, which proved also to be the beginning of the end for four empires: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires (Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, 1977; The Age of Empire 1875–1914, 1987, 326). The short twentieth century followed; it ended with the collapse of communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War (Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, 1994). Hobsbawm’s paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explain the political conditions that ruled in the economically weak East Central European region (further referred to as ECE) that lags behind the West until today. How did the region’s intellectuals and politicians conceive of the political rule to which they were subject in the late eighteenth and nineteenty centuries? What political ideas or programs did they promote? This is the major question that lies behind the book under review.

The cover picture, though not identified, shows the portrait of the Polish Renaissance court jester Stánczyk (c. 1480–1560) by Jan Matejko. Stánczyk is an emblem of Polish national identity and of the historical memory of Poland’s past as a sovereign state prior to the divisions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a good choice of cover picture in view of ECE political history, since Stánczyk not only illustrates the fate of Poland but can also be understood as an emblematic illustration of the region’s historical past: Sovereignty in the epoch of the Renaissance was lost in the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century occupation to the large and powerful Austrian and Russian Empires, which subjected the smaller and weaker Central European nations to their conservative-feudalist rule, creating multiethnic states. Earlier still, in the early fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had conquered the South Slavic people of the Balkans. The empires crushed any attempt at political liberation and economic modernization during the 1848 Revolution. Then, after 50 years of attempts to negotiate autonomy, self-determination, and economic progress, only the end of World War I would restore the sovereignty of some of the region’s nations: Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia; Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians in their own nation-states; and the Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins united in the kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In contrast to an analysis of Western political thought, the intellectual history of East Central Europe has played a minor role in international academic study, mainly because few scholars can read sources in the region’s languages. Regional scholarship has not neglected the history and political thought of the ECE nation-states that had liberated themselves from communist regimes in 1989, but few authoritative studies have been published in a major international language. Particularly noteworthy for their comparative approach to the region’s political and economic backwardness are Carsten Goehrke and Seraina Gilli, eds., Transformation und historisches Erbe in den Staaten des europäischen Ostens (2000), and the volume edited by Daniel Chirot, The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (1989), neither of which is mentioned in the bibliography of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Backwardness is a major topos, indeed the starting point of the region’s political thought and intellectual history (p. 4). A comprehensive study analyzing the region’s political ideas and programs has so far been missing in the mosaic of our knowledge. Can this new work fill the gap?

I have no doubt that the first volume will attract the attention and interest of political scientists, political philosophers, historians, and anybody curious about the region’s intellectual development. It is the first study that covers the history of modern political thought in Poland, the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), Hungary, Upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia), Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Transylvania, Ruthenia, Galicia, Ukraine, the territory of today’s Belarus, and the Baltic states.

The authors have excluded Russia, which makes sense because many studies in a Western language deal with Russian intellectual history. A selection includes Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers (1978), Andrzej Walicki’s A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (1979), Wilhelm Goerdt’s Russische Philosophie: Grundlagen (1995), and A History of Russian Thought (2010), edited by William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord.

The epochal changes brought about by the French Revolution of 1789 prompted a major intellectual upheaval in East Central Europe. Not only does this first volume offer an unprecedented and detailed look at the region over a time span of roughly 129 years, but it also scrutinizes the most significant currents of modern political thought and how they affected the region: conservatism, liberalism, positivism, socialism, irrationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-Semitism, and, as a driving and underpinning force, nationalism, in the sense of the right to freely express one’s national identity in terms of culture (confessional rights, language rights) and political demands (autonomy, federal constitutional arrangements, sovereignty). The chapters are organized in accordance with this broad field of study. The wide range of the subsections is remarkable, offering the reader an insight into less prominent themes, such as church views on liberalism (pp. 368–76); the emergence of agrarian thought (which the authors, somewhat oddly, call “Agrarian populism”; pp. 469–84); the women’s question (pp. 593–608); the rise of political anti-Semitism (pp. 382–90); and federalism as a solution to the issue of nations and national minorities, respectively (pp. 512–29).

The authors attempt to present a novel methodological approach, which was intended to create a “flexible framework of symmetric and asymmetric comparisons, giving voice to both synchronicity and asynchrony” (p. 3). Their primary goal is to present to the reader a narrative of the political thought that emerged in the region as a reaction to, and reception of, Western political ideas (p. 2), without enforcing what they refer to as the “‘double-bind’ of mutual conditioning” of the research method and the substance, the contents of the research (p. 6). I am not sure if I really understood the method applied, since a detailed analysis of local and regional political thought within the relevant political context would have been sufficient; then, in a second step, the authors could have conducted a comparison with Western political thought and explained in detail how the ideas of the progressive West affected East Central Europe—and why and where they did not. Such a traditional analytical and comparative approach has been the standard method not only in historical analysis but also in the analysis of political thought.

At first glance, I liked the authors’ new and principal idea of scientific cooperation: For eight years, they had been working as a team, using the “dialogical method” (p. 8). They did not assign single chapters to individual authors, but discussed each chapter and also the subsections in sessions of “collective brainstorming” (p. 8), focusing on the reconstruction of “the negotiation of modernity in the light of the change of intellectual paradigms” (p. 10).

Unfortunately, the authors’ democratic, egalitarian, and, overall, well-meant collective approach caused two major issues I find highly problematic in terms of scholarship, the first of which is insufficient scholarly responsibility and accountability, that is, authorship. As a reader familiar with the field, I would like to know who wrote what, particularly in view of the ambitious research framework.

Secondly, there is a worrying lack of definitions of key concepts such as “ideology,” “theory,” “nation,” “national minority,” or “pan-national ideology.” This contributed to the fact that an interested but uninformed reader would feel rather lost in this large work, which quoted persons one had never heard about. An example of how the lack of definition of key concepts confuses the reader: Pan-Slavism (p. 309) is not defined, although other scholars variously consider it a cultural theory of the Slavic Renaissance, starting with the text of Johann Kollár (Ueber literarische Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation, 1837); a political ideology virulent in the middle and late nineteenth century in East Central Europe; or an aspect of tsarist Russia’s foreign policy. With which definition of pan-Slavism do the authors start? This reader could not tell.

Most problematic is a further aspect relating to authorship: Throughout the text, the authors indicate their sources, which follow the historian’s method of quoting the first publication on the theme subject to analysis. So far, so good. But lengthy subsections that inform the reader about a political thinker’s thought require additional secondary sources and a discussion of the interpretations of contemporary scholarship, and these are missing. Where secondary sources are cited, the presentation could also be clearer. For example, on pages 300–302, they write about the split in the Slovak national movement in the context of the end of Austrian neo-absolutism of the early 1860s. They refer to the “New Slovak School” and the “Old Slovak School,” focusing on Ján Palárik as the most prominent member of the New School and referring to a text of Palárik’s and the eminent Slovak philosopher Tibor Pichler’s analysis of Palárik’s thought. The references are not mistaken but imprecise, since the reader cannot distinguish which information originates from Palárik’s text and which from Pichler’s. The references are not helpful, because they inform the reader, in a kind of librarian’s style, only what text the authors used, but not the precise passage in the text.

In general, the quotation style does not accord with the scholarly principle of transparency: The reader does not have the opportunity to consult the sources. A second example: On pages 311–12, the authors present L'udovíc Štúr’s last œuvre, Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft (1937), referring to his “Hegelian historical dialectics” (p. 311). Yet the Slovak national awakener did not mention in his study that he used Hegelian dialectics as his method of inquiry, since he was not interested in telling his readers about his intellectual orientation. The message he wanted to convey was pan-Slavism as the only moral and political choice for the Slavs in East Central Europe who lived under Habsburg and Ottoman rule. While it is true that he had changed from Slovak national awakener to a supporter of pan-Slavism after the failed 1848 revolution, one wonders about the source informing the reader about his Hegelianism and his radical change of mind. Štúr certainly did not write about his change of mind in his last study. The unclear quotation policy in A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is highly problematic: Have the authors really not engaged with secondary sources, or have they failed to be influenced by them?

A thorough and consistent final editing could have rid the text of some formal inconsistencies, such as “the narodnik movement” (p. 377); the correct concept is the movement of the Russian narodniki. The reference to first names, as well as dates of birth and death, is inconsistent throughout the entire text, for example “Karl Johann Herberstein (1719–1787)” (p. 34) and “Similarly, Mazzini stressed . . .” (p. 207), with no mention of Mazzini’s first name or his dates of birth and death until later in the text.

In spite of the formal and scholarly misgivings mentioned, however, this work is a fresh and novel attempt to contribute to the history of political thought on an underresearched region. I do hope that the authors reconsider their quotation policy for the second volume.