Bureaucracy, Enlightenment, and Habsburg Central Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 792-812 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iryna Vushko
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
The Will ◽  
Methodological Problems

This article describes the career and work of Joseph Karl Brigido, the governor of Austrian Galicia between 1780 and 1794. Through the prism of Brigido and his services in Galicia, it analyzes the functioning of the Austrian bureaucracy at the turn of the eighteenth century. Even though the scholarship of Austrian administration and bureaucracy is a continually expanding field in historiography, people like Joseph Brigido—middle- and low-ranking officials in the provinces—remain practically unknown to historians. This gap in scholarship creates certain methodological problems. Historians tend to describe the Austrian bureaucracy as an abstract institution, formed of German officials who imposed the will of the central government on the non-German elites in the provinces. Such a vision of permanent conflict and reciprocal antagonism, however, does not reflect the reality of bureaucratic organization in Galicia and in the Habsburg monarchy at large. An emotionally detached and politically neutral bureaucracy was indeed an ideal, which Habsburg enlightened rulers hoped to achieve during the late eighteenth century. It never became a reality. By placing the Austrian bureaucracy in its historical context, this article presents it as a highly heterogeneous institution, formed of men who had different social and career backgrounds and different understandings of government and administration. Local Austrian bureaucrats were often more reflective of particular political and economic reality than their sovereigns in Vienna.

Elisheva Carlebach. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xii, 324 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 388-389
Author(s):  
R. Po-chia Hsia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.

Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Sturm Und Drang ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Mind

Hamann was one of the most important critics of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung. He attacked the Aufklärung chiefly because it gave reason undue authority over faith. It misunderstood faith, which consists in an immediate personal experience, inaccessible to reason. The main fallacy of the Aufklärung was hypostasis, the reification of ideas, the artificial abstraction of reason from its social and historical context. Hamann stressed the social and historical dimension of reason, that it must be embodied in society, history and language. He also emphasized the pivotal role of language in the development of reason. The instrument and criterion of reason was language, whose only sanction was tradition and use. Hamann was a sharp critic of Kant, whose philosophy exemplified all the sins of the Aufklärung. Hamann attacked the critical philosophy for its purification of reason from experience, language and tradition. He also strongly objected to all its dualisms, which seemed arbitrary and artificial. The task of philosophy was to unify all the various functions of the mind, seeing reason, will and feeling as an indivisible whole. Although he was original and unorthodox, Hamann’s critique of reason should be placed within the tradition of Protestant nominalism. Hamann saw himself as a defender of Luther, whose reputation was on the wane in late eighteenth-century Germany. Hamann was also a founder of the Sturm und Drang, the late eighteenth-century literary movement which celebrated personal freedom and revolt. His aesthetics defended creative genius and the metaphysical powers of art. It marked a sharp break with the rationalism of the classical tradition and the empiricism of late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Hamann was a seminal influence upon Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel and Kierkegaard.

The Five Adored in Early-Nineteenth-Century Sikh Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-116
Author(s):  
Louis E. Fenech
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Power And Authority

This chapter begins with a summary of the early- to mid-eighteenth-century historical context, which was marked by a decline in the power and authority of the Mughal court and the gradual rise of Sikh power in the Punjab. It then moves on to examine the formation of the Panj Piare construct in the context of the rise of various armed ascetic movements in the late eighteenth century, many of which competed for resources with the various Khalsa Sikhs of the period. It ends by examining the origin story of the Five Beloved in early-nineteenth-century Sikh texts such as Gur-panth Prakāś, Siṅgh Sāgar, and the Sūraj Prakāś.

scholarly journals Crossing the Mediterranean

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
The Will ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter discusses that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 epitomized a discursive practice in the Levant. European Great Powers of the time looked to supply security beyond their imperial territories by military expeditions, allegedly for the benefit of the locals even if against the will of the regional sovereigns—in this case, the Ottoman imperial rulers. The architects of the 1798 occupation, Bonaparte and Talleyrand, portrayed their expedition as a ‘service’ the Ottoman Empire. But, in reality, the 1798 expedition was the outcome of decades long debates in France. It ultimately resulted from a diverse set of geostrategic, political, economic and financial determinants that defined the Eastern Question in the late eighteenth century. What exactly did the Eastern Question pertain to before the nineteenth century then? And how did 1798 relate to it?

Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Conservative Measure ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.

Western Ukraine in the Interwar period

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
John-Paul Himka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Carpathian Mountains ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The concept of “Western Ukraine” is not entirely a static one. As a valid unit of historical analysis it first appears in the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburg monarchy added Galicia (1772) and Bukovina (occupied 1774, annexed 1787) to its collection of territories; already part of the collection was the Ukrainian-inhabited region of Transcarpathia (depending on how one counts, it had been Habsburg since as early as 1526 or as late as the early eighteenth century). Of course, one can also read back certain features unifying Western Ukraine prior to the 1770s, such as the culturally formative influence on all three regions of the medieval Rus’ principality, later kingdom, of Galicia and Volhynia, as well as the presence of the Carpathian mountains, which was much more than a matter of mere geology (hence the Russophiles’ preferred name for Western Ukraine—Carpathian Rus'). Still, in the centuries prior to their incorporation into the Habsburg monarchy, the three regions had experienced such disparate political histories—Galicia as part of Poland, Bukovina of Moldavia, and Transcarpathia of Hungary—that there is little validity in treating them then as a historical unit.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegfried Weichlein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Phase

With the French Revolution, the ‘nation’ entered a new phase as a model for political order that replaced corporate societies and triggered a large-scale process of emancipation and modernisation in European societies. Until the eighteenth century the political order in central Europe was organised along other lines, such as the state, the Reich, the monarchy, or the republic. That changed dramatically between the Seven Years War and around 1800. Despite its thorough universalism, Enlightenment in Germany combined universalism with patriotism, a rather unlikely combination in the twentieth century. For most educated authors in the age of Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism and patriotism were not opposites, but complementary. How, then, did contemporaries in the late eighteenth century conceptualise cosmopolitanism, patriotism, and nationalism, and relate them? How did they explain the complicity of cosmopolitanism and patriotism? This chapter outlines different answers to these questions relating to the period between the Seven Years War and around 1800.

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