The Habsburg monarchy

About this book

"Robin Okey's book shows how the Habsburg peoples experienced the same social, economic and political processes as most other Europeans, in ways that cast interesting light on these processes from both the European and the Habsburg angle. The Austrian Enlightenment brings out the authoritarian streak in the Enlightenment as a whole; Habsburg liberalism exemplifies the fragility of a liberalism of elite 'notables'; the Monarchy's industrialisation, where it occurred, is a marked case of the gradualism which historians increasingly see as more common than the 'take-off' version of Rostow." "Emphasising the domestic roots of the Monarchy's decline. Okey does not, however, subordinate the national problem to that of underlying socio-economic backwardness but instead argues for the inextricable entanglement of the two themes, as nationalism emerged from a process of social mobilization which threatened the position of dominant Austro-Germans and Magyars. His book poses the question, which he seeks to answer, as to whether the forces that enabled on often creditable adaptation to the nineteenth century could have equipped the Monarchy to survive twentieth-century democracy had world war not supervened."--BOOK JACKET.