Alan Sked . Metternich and Austria: An Evaluation . New York : Palgrave Macmillan . 2008 . Pp. xiii, 306. Cloth $84.50, paper $29.95.
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.115.4.1247
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)European Political History Analysis
ResumoIn the preface to this volume, Alan Sked justifiably points out that the period from 1815 to 1848 is “unfashionable and neglected” and suggests that new research is needed. In the meantime, he thinks “it imperative to give readers an up-to-date account of what should be known about [Klemens Wenzel von] Metternich already” (p. ix). While few would disagree with the former sentiments, it is questionable whether Sked achieves the latter aim. He builds on views already developed in his Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (1989), but less is added to his previous work than one would hope. This book is organized around a series of questions that sound like they derive from 1970s exam papers. In the introductory chapter, for example, Sked asks, “Has Metternich been misunderstood?” The answer is “yes,” but thankfully Sked does understand him and will firmly put right anyone who does not. Thus, Henry Kissinger's old contention that Metternich's domestic principles left the monarchy a lost cause is dismissed as “nonsense” (p. 2), allowing Sked to reiterate the argument of his previous book that the monarchy had a considerable capacity to reinvent itself throughout the nineteenth century. Perhaps the novel aspect here is the post-9/11 portrayal of Metternich as someone “dedicated to waging a war on terror” but without the widespread use of torture or undermining the rule of law (p. 3). Chapter one identifies Metternich's terrorist threat as the French Revolution and those conspirators who after 1815 wished to restart revolution in Europe. There follows a lengthy diatribe against historians who have failed to grasp that, first, Metternich's fears were justified, and second, there was no inevitable tide of liberal and national progress that Metternich was somehow holding back. “The old ‘progressive’ Marxist framework for the period 1815 to 1848,” Sked announces, “must be abandoned, which is not to say, of course, that wider forces were not at work” (p. 14). By this stage at the latest, the reader begins to wonder if Sked is not fighting too many old battles: he takes issue with Paul Ginsborg's 1979 study of the Venetian revolution of 18481–849, and the historians allegedly still persisting with their wrongheaded interpretations turn out to be Eric J. Hobsbawm and Jacques Droz (with works cited in the endnotes stemming from 1977 and 1967, respectively). The author makes no effort to engage with recent syntheses of early nineteenth-century Europe by the likes of Martin Lyons, Michael Broers, Jonathan Sperber, and Dieter Langewiesche.
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