Uniquely among present-day Habsburg historians, Alan Sked is also a politician. He once stood for the British parliament as a liberal candidate and later founded and led two subsequent conservative, anti-EU parties only to turn against them because of their extremism and antiliberalism. In other words, Sked, who is a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, thinks very much for himself, which is also shown by his learned, elegant, witty, and provocative books. In his The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War, 1848 (London: Longman, 1979), he raises the question whether Field Marshal Radetzky, generally known as an arch-reactionary, was something of a Communist, and he proves convincingly that in the class war then raging in northern Italy, the field marshal stood much closer to the people than the Italian nobles who opposed him in the name of liberal nationalism. In his justly famous Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (Longman, 1989), Sked states, to many readers' regret, that the monarchy, having weathered the great crisis of 1848, “rose rather than declined before 1914. It can even be agued that there was no domestic or even foreign threat to its integrity until 1918” (6).

Alan Sked was once a student of A. J. P. Taylor, and although the two can hardly be said to agree on their evaluation of, for instance, the historical role of Metternich, Sked resembles Taylor in making every one of his sentences thought-provoking. None of Sked's books and exciting essays (see, for instance, his “Mirror Images: Kossuth and Jelacić in 1848–49,” in László Péter, Martin C. Rady, and P. A. Sherwood, eds., Lajos Kossuth Sent Word…: Papers Delivered on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of Kossuth's Birth, SSEES Occasional Papers No. 56 [London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2003], 135–82) is purely narrative history; rather, they form a series of meditations on specific subjects and on the subjects' historiography. Those who read his works, including readers of Metternich and Austria, must possess a fundamental knowledge of the topic but are then rewarded with stimulating ideas.

Sked is a fighter: in Metternich and Austria, for instance, his sparring partner is Paul Schroeder whose evaluation of Metternich and of nineteenth-century history in general he strongly rejects. But Sked also turns on entire groups of historians, such as the Hungarians, whom he charges with undue leniency toward Kossuth and company. Or as he writes on the first page of his Introduction, “[in 1848] matters got out of hand when the Hungarians broke their promises with respect to foreign, defence, and financial affairs.” These are strong words indeed, especially in view of Sked's similarly strong condemnation of contemporaneous Habsburg behavior. As he puts it in his essay on Lajos Kossuth and General Baron Josip Jelačić: “If one looks at both men [Kossuth and Jelačić] dispassionately and objectively, both turn out to be glorious, charismatic failures, frustrated national leaders who were defeated by Habsburg intrigue and duplicity” (“Mirror Images”, 136–37). Yet even if both the Habsburgs and the Hungarian leaders were famously duplicitous, one cannot help feeling that perhaps one side was a little less duplicitous than the other. In any case, more traditionalist historians than Sked still insist on seeing Kossuth as a liberal nationalist rebel and Jelacić as one whose loyalty to the House of Austria overrode all other considerations.

Metternich and Austria tackles both domestic and international issues under the overarching theme of the monarchy having been, between 1815 and 1848, an island of “peace, prosperity, stability, cultural renewal, and economic transformation” (246). For this, Prince Metternich was largely responsible. Sked marshals particularly strong evidence to show that Lombardy and Venetia were the best-governed parts of the Italian peninsula; that Austrian tyrannical oppression existed mainly in the imagination of Italian superpatriots; and that the Austrian bureaucracy, police, and army in northern Italy consisted largely of native Italians.

One of the book's other main themes, amply developed, is that Paul Schroeder errs in viewing the Vienna Congress as representing a revolution in morals when, in reality, it was but the continuation of the old power play among the largest European countries. Another of Sked's theses is that the fear of revolution was the guiding principle of all monarchies after 1815 and not only of the Austria of Metternich. Furthermore, Sked argues that Metternich had no intention of federalizing the monarchy and that, in his period, the Austrian police, especially the secret police, were minuscule institutions. Certainly, fewer police, municipal guards, and army regulars protected emperor-kings Francis and Ferdinand in Vienna than the number of special constables, army regulars, and “bobbies” who surrounded Queen Victoria in London. Sked assures us that Austria was not the “China of Europe,” and that, despite a strict censorship, world literature reached the Austrians. Finally, Sked makes clear that “no Machiavellian system of divide and rule existed with regard to the nations of the Empire” (179). On the contrary, “cultural nationalism was very much encouraged by the Austrians” (191). Delaying the triumph of radical nationalism was certainly Metternich's aim, and his major achievement, Sked argues, was to delay the triumph of German nationalism. This seems to be true, but it is harder to say whether German nationalism, if unchecked by Metternich, would not have taken a more civilized form than it actually did. Whatever one thinks of all this, it is certain that Alan Sked's recent book will be a delight for many and a cause for exasperation to others.