A Rock of Order Christopher Clark
Review of: Metternich: Strategist and Visionary
by Wolfram Siemann, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Harvard, 900 pp., £31.95, November 2019, 9780674743922
"Wolfram Siemann’s evocative and deeply researched biography places the quest for peace at the centre of Metternich’s life and thought. Peace did not mean for him the mere absence of war. The vortex of violence that swept across Europe between 1792 and 1815 showed that peace was vulnerable unless it was founded on robust structures and principles, in short on a European order. But this order had to be of a special kind, capable of connecting the arrangements regulating the interaction between states with factors that ensured a stable social and political order within them."
Great review, thank you.