From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America - Hardcover

"Gerald Stourzh is one of the most distinguished historians of the early republic, and this collection should serve as a reminder of what a great scholar he is. Moreover, his essays on Austrian history will help Americans better understand the debates taking place in Europe over the European Union and immigration." - Gordon Wood, Brown University"

Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh's sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career - from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria. This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago - of which he draws a brilliant picture - and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, "From Vienna to Chicago and Back" will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.