A World Restored Critical Essay | Critical Review by Quincy Wright

Critical Review by Quincy Wright

SOURCE: A review of “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 4, July, 1958, pp. 953–55.

In the following review, Wright offers a positive assessment of A World Restored, concluding that Kissinger skillfully explores and interprets international relations in the post-Napoleonic period.

This book [A World Restored] is less a history of Europe's defeat of, and reconstruction after, Napoleon than an interpretation of that history in universal terms. The author recognizes that history does not repeat itself exactly, but he insists that the problems of different periods, the methods of dealing with them, and the motivation of the actors may be similar. Consequently, “generalization” may be “abstracted from the uniqueness of individual experience.” He seldom makes explicit an analogy between the post-Napoleonic and post-Hitlerian periods, but the alert reader is continuously aware of an implicit analogy. The Russia...
(read more)