Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

"It’s a very, very good book. If you think of some of the 20th-century thinkers— Wittgenstein , Popper , Friedrich von Hayek , Ludwig von Mises , Joseph Schumpeter —that’s quite a lot from a smallish country, which was by then a republic. There are also many others who are less known to the general public. Hans Kelsen was a constitutionalist who went to America and became the greatest constitutional lawyer in the West. The constitution that Austria still has—when the Second Republic was revived after the Second World War—is, in fact, based on his constitution. There was also Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who knew everybody everywhere, including Einstein , Adenauer and Churchill . The idea of what we now call the EU was really born with him, and he was the first person to receive the Charlemagne prize in Aachen for services in respect of the unification of Europe. He was a typical cosmopolitan Austrian."