Books by Franz Leander Fillafer
La discusión sobre el impacto del “giro global” en la historiografía intelectual habilita una ref... more La discusión sobre el impacto del “giro global” en la historiografía intelectual habilita una reflexión sobre la actualidad de la disciplina, sus potencialidades y limitaciones. Desde finales del siglo pasado, la historia intelectual se destacó entre nuevas corrientes que cuestionaron viejos paradigmas históricos. En diálogo con la historia política y cultural, esta corriente renovó las concepciones sobre la historia de ideas y aportó sensibilidad al tratamiento de textos literarios, filosóficos y políticos.
Este libro invita a explorar la compleja red de intercambios entre tradiciones historiográficas. Renovando perspectivas sobre agentes productores como escritores, intelectuales, editores y traductores, los artículos examinan sus intenciones en diversos contextos y proponen un balance sobre el estado de la disciplina en un momento de profundos cambios.
González, Martín Pedro y Juan Manuel Romero (comps.) La historia intelectual frente al desafío del "giro global"
Índice:
1. Introducción: la nueva historia intelectual y el desafío del “giro global”
Juan Manuel Romero y Martín Pedro González
2.Los orígenes de los derechos de los trabajadores: republicanismo, comercio
y la construcción de la moderna teoría social en Gran Bretaña, 1796-1805 Gregory Claeys
3. Revolución 1.0. O cómo revolución fue revolucionada
Keith Michael Baker
4. Contextualismo, historia intelectual global y neoliberalismo: una conversación con Quentin Skinner
Franz Fillafer; Julia McClure y Quentin Skinner
5. El giro internacional en la historia intelectual
David Armitage
6. ¿Un mundo conectado? De la unidad de la historia a la historia global
Franz L. Fillafer
7.El estado de la historia intelectual: lo local y lo global
Richard Whatmore
Das Geschichtsbild der Aufklärung als Projekt der säkular-demokratischen Moderne entstand maßgebl... more Das Geschichtsbild der Aufklärung als Projekt der säkular-demokratischen Moderne entstand maßgeblich durch die Französische Revolution – doch es verschüttete ihre historische Vielgestaltigkeit. Franz L. Fillafer entdeckt die Aufklärung in der Habsburgermonarchie neu: Anhand ihrer Gestalter sowie der von ihnen aufgebauten Wissenskultur und Gesellschaft weist er erstmals nach, dass das Habsburgerreich während der »Restauration« kein Bollwerk gegen Aufklärung und Revolution war. Stattdessen legt Fillafer Varianten der Aufklärung frei, die nicht in der Revolution mündeten, sondern gerade im Kontext der Revolutionsabwehr gediehen. Sie speisten sich aus eigenen Quellen und prägten den Habsburgerstaat langfristig.
Indem es die Aufklärung von der Fixierung auf »radikale Ideen« aus Westeuropa und auf ihre angebliche Vollendung durch Revolution und Liberalismus löst, legt das Buch ein Analysemodell für die europäische Aufklärung, aber auch für ihre Transformation im 19. Jahrhundert vor.
This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Tak... more This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for studying nature and society—a new science that would enlighten all of humankind. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Uncovering these worlds of positivism, the volume ranges from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe, Russia, and Brazil, examining positivism's impact as one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the modern world. Positivists reinvented science, claiming it to be distinct from and superior to the humanities. They predicated political governance on their refashioned science of society, and as political activists, they sought and often failed to reconcile their universalism with the values of multiculturalism. Providing a genealogy of scientific governance that is sorely needed in an age of post-truth politics, this volume breaks new ground in the fields of intellectual and global history, the history of science, and philosophy.
The history of Central European historiography is still something of a Cinderella subject: it is ... more The history of Central European historiography is still something of a Cinderella subject: it is due to disciplinary dispensations and language boundaries that critical, comparative, and comprehensive studies of the historiographies of the region have remained rare exceptions. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on the Central European historiography of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century, on the works of Eduard Winter (1896–1982) and Fritz Valjavec (1909–1960) and on their reception in the region in particular. It brings together studies on Austrian, Czechoslovak, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Yugoslavian historiography.
Winter's and Valjavec's books, published in Brno/Brünn under Nazi occupation in 1943 and 1944 respectively, established “Josephinism” as a central category of research on the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Winter and Valjavec were both embroiled in Nazi rule, Winter served as a professor at the Heydrich Foundation at Prague, Valjavec held a chair at Alfred Six's Berlin academy of political science and was a member of the Einsatzgruppe D in whose activities in the Bukovina he participated. The chapters of our book show the conduits and catalysts of Enlightenment research under the impact of Nazi rule, they analyse to what extent the concepts and politics of Ost-, Südost- and Volkstumsforschung dovetailed with governmental directives, and study how Winter and Valjavec managed to garner support for their research programs after 1945 in both halves of bisected Europe: Valjavec was installed as the director of the Institut für Südostforschung in Munich, while Winter, after a brief stint at Vienna, relocated to the GDR, becoming professor at Halle and later at East Berlin.
Our book traces how Winter's and Valjavec's “Josephinism” was ensconced as a key concept for the study of the Habsburg Monarchy. It highlights that Winter's and Valjavec's concepts were shaped by their own experience of this very Monarchy and of its collapse: Both came from German-speaking families in bilingual contexts, Winter was born in North Bohemia, Valjavec grew up in the Banat and in Budapest, and their epistemes and concepts of regional scientific collaborations reflect these origins. The book looks at the fortunes of “Josephinism” in the region from the 1940s to the present. It contextualises the sprawling literature on “Josephinism” in all successor states of the Monarchy, and it fleshes out the promise and perils of its application as a basic template and instant structuring device: what can “Josephinism” reveal, what does it occlude? This reflection on "Josephinism" offers important lessons on how the diverse historical trajectories within the Monarchy can be synchronized, and about the political-cultural imperatives behind commonly used strategies of generalization, of projecting the history of one region of the Monarchy on its entirety. These matters of selection and selectivity as well as of periodization – of the sequence of Baroque, Enlightenment, and Restoration in particular – are salient issues in all chapters.
Papers by Franz Leander Fillafer
My obituary for the sorely missed Anil Bhatti pays tribute to his pathbreaking re-elaboration of ... more My obituary for the sorely missed Anil Bhatti pays tribute to his pathbreaking re-elaboration of the concept of culture whose crucial significance for the humanities I try to flesh out: Bhatti's studies on pluriculturalism in its Indian and Habsburg varieties tilt a lance against multiculturalism and the ghettoising practise of liberal segregation it entails. Thereby, Bhatti's work on syncretism and polyglotism acts as a salutary foil to celebrations of ineffaceable cultural (i.e. linguistic and religious) differences that obfuscate cross-cultural commonalities, processes of exchange and thicker sets of social solidarities.
My chapter seeks to situate positivism afresh in the politics of theory of the nineteenth and twe... more My chapter seeks to situate positivism afresh in the politics of theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, has long been written off as a hermit-like system builder who produced works about as gratifying as chewing gravel in his Paris apartment. Comte's project, positivism, has served as a bugbear, routinely dismissed by Marx, Weber, Simmel, Husserl and less distinguished detractors as an attempt at hostile takeover by the natural sciences who allegedly sought to conquer the humanities. My chapter proposes a fresh reading of the problem at hand: It begins by reconstructing Comte's innovative philosophy of history and science in the light of his trenchant anti-imperialist commitments (I.). For Comte, "Humanity" replaced both nature as the source of scientific laws, with the latter now read as socially and historically conditioned artifacts, and the West whose role as civilizing guardian of the world Comte subjected to a vitriolic critique.
In the mid-nineteenth century German historicists like Droysen used the rejection of Comtean positivism as a convenient tool of self-authentication. Indeed the historicist agenda crystallized in response to the work of Henry T. Buckle, a devotee of Comte who garbled and misrepresented the doctrines he professed to embrace (II.).
Part III. discusses the interlocking crises of historicism and of positivism in the Fin de Siècle around 1900, here particular attention is given to the Viennese scientists and philosophers Heinrich Gomperz and Edgar Zilsel who, from the fringes of the Vienna Circle, rethought the concept of historical and natural laws in compelling and trailblazing ways.
The last part (IV.) is devoted to the scuffles over positivism in the 1960s when the Frankfurt school resurrected logical positivism as a straw-man now embodied by Karl Popper. My conclusion throws into relief how positivism was fabricated in a sequence of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural encounters (or, put less politely, purposeful misunderstandings), and how it came to serve as a precious tool of self-enhancement and demarcation in the development of the sciences since the 1830s.
The subdiscipline of Austrian history is under pressure, some might even say under duress. Its me... more The subdiscipline of Austrian history is under pressure, some might even say under duress. Its methods, geographical purview, temporal scope, and future prospects are no longer self-evident. Once the pivot of historiography practised at our universities, Austrian history is engulfed by diverse demands that reflect the shifting proclivities of the humanities in general, the challenge of global history being among the most formidable. My paper proposes a fresh approach that permits us to de-compartmentalize Habsburg Central European history and to de-provincialize it by reinserting it into European and global histories, while also proving its significance to contemporary Austria.
Bohemia between Empires Bohemian Jurisprudence as a Switchboard in the Central European Circulati... more Bohemia between Empires Bohemian Jurisprudence as a Switchboard in the Central European Circulation of Knowledge
My article uses Bohemian jurisprudence between the 17 th and the 20 th centuries to showcase the interpretive benefits of a relational history of Habsburg Central Europe that both moves beyond artificial national divisions and sacrosanct epochal thresholds, 1918 in particular. Since the 17 th century, Bohemia's position at the interstices between the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands made its jurisprudence a centre of sprawling innovation: Prague jurist Franz X. Neumann disputed the Holy Roman Empire's suzerainty over Bohemia and hence dismantled claims about the automatic validity of Roman law for the kingdom of St. Wenceslaus. This position at the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire turned Bohemia into a hotbed of natural law and into the chief fulcrum of Habsburg private law codification under Maria Theresia (1750s). The Bohemian ingredient also played a crucial role in Leo Thun-Hohenstein's reform of the Habsburg Monarchy's educational system in the 1850s: A Bohemian noble patriot, Thun-Hohenstein sought to extirpate natural law, which he viewed as the mainspring of Revolution and centralisation-the two menaces that subverted Bohemia's statehood within the Monarchy. Thun's hostility to pan-imperial public law and to social contract theories destroyed the validity grounds of Habsburg legal culture but reinforced the primacy of private law. Thereby Thun produced a legal positivism that depended on the categories of Pandectist private law and permeated ostensibly sharply separated "national" communities of lawyers, as I show with reference to Czech and Germanspeaking jurists in Bohemia, the schools of Jiří Pražák and Joseph Ulbrich in particular. My paper moves beyond 1918 to flesh out the Monarchy's legal and administrative legacy that cuts against the grain of programmatic De-Austrification (Odrakouštění), and discusses the longevity of the Monarchy's 1867 December constitution in post-1918 Czechoslovakia. Swallowing their pride, German nationalists of different hues retracted their pre-1918 criticisms of the constitution and rediscovered it as a weapon against the Versailles system.
My chapter is devoted to what might be called the brokerage of pasts: the interplay between the d... more My chapter is devoted to what might be called the brokerage of pasts: the interplay between the discovery of the Greek and Roman ancient worlds on the one hand and non-classical antiquities on the other. The following essay attempts to recover the intense exchange of concepts and values that occured between these pasts as well as between the templates and techniques used to study them. I begin by alluding to the global historical dimension of this relationship: Unearthing ancient civilisations across the globe, the age of discoveries provincialised the Mediterranean antiquity without diminishing its prestige: Graeco- Roman antiquity became a convertible asset, a template permitting its European users to explore and embellish their own barbarian pasts. Central European humanists made good use of these participatory chronopolitics, and the Counter- Reformational Habsburg Reconquista against Ottoman and Protestant foes reaped the fruits of the humanist learning it absorbed. Latinate to the bone, the new Catholic intellectual culture blended romanitas and christianitas: As papal Rome instilled its sacred ancestry into antiquity by discovering Christian vestiges in the Eternal City, local historians of Central Europe inserted their past into the ancient world via Catholicism. Baroque humanism annexed the Habsburg lands to the symbolic landscape of Rome, but it also encouraged the design of local pasts whose study relied on cross-referencing with ancient prototypes. In their pursuit of competing ancestral visions, eighteenth-century Habsburg antiquarians used their superb knowledge of the classics and the Roman sediment in the region to explore pre-, non-, and post-Roman pasts. Enlightenment statecraft under Maria Theresa and Joseph II prompted classicist patriots across the Empire to rediscover their local Renaissance humanisms as golden ages when the cultivation of Latin and the respective vernaculars had flourished in tandem. A creative response to the time regime of Enlightenment progress and delay, the rediscovery of Renaissance humanisms permitted its promotors to prove their historical cultures’ self-reliant access to classical antiquity that did not depend on mediation by others. Patriotic scholars cropped, tweaked, and conflated chronologies in order to prove the equivalence of their antiquities to the classical heritage. The last section of my chapter carries my argument into the nineteenth century and recovers the Habsburg alternative to neo-humanism. As officials of a multilingual and multi-religious monarchy, Habsburg scholars encountered groups that their French, English, and German counterparts chose to idealise or orientalise as neighbours and collaborators: Greeks and Ottomans. Deeply steeped in the management of imperial diversity, Habsburg scholars resisted the idealisation of classical Greece and complicated its link with modern Hellas. At the same time, these Central European learned men retained a multi-layered framework of Mediterranean antiquity and resisted the obliteration of its Hebrew, Asian, and African components.
Full text available at: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110653052-
023/html
The French Revolution and the grotesque belong together like two peas in a pod – that is, if we r... more The French Revolution and the grotesque belong together like two peas in a pod – that is, if we rely on eyewitness accounts of the 1790s and their aftermath. It may come as something of a surprise how little sustained reflection this linkage has invited so far, particularly since its study can serve as a springboard for a social and cultural theory of the age of Revolutions. Those who lived through the Revolutionary era perceived their age as one of form failure, and the grotesque was the exceptionally supple, pliable medium through which these anxieties could be expressed. Since the 1790s, the grotesque turned into a site of contestation where the frontiers between the self and the other, above and below, as well as between civilization and barbarism were constantly redrawn, collapsed, and subjected to playful travesty.
This essay seeks to offer a new reading of Habsburg legal culture and the rule of law. It links t... more This essay seeks to offer a new reading of Habsburg legal culture and the rule of law. It links two salient themes of Central European history that are rarely treated in conjunction, namely the Monarchy's longstanding constitutional pluralism and the emergence of its unitary civil law since 1753. My essay highlights the significance of Bohemian jurisprudence as a precedent-setting fulcrum of legal unification that became crucial for the Monarchy as a whole. I try to explain Bohemia's saliency and fecundity by uncovering its place at the interstices of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands: This intermediary position enabled Bohemian jurists to creatively tweak Roman law whose full validity for Bohemia they disputed and to buttress the pre-eminence of natural law instead. Around 1800, the repurposing of the Monarchy into an anti-Revolutionary power paradoxically made the enshrinement of Enlightenment private law possible. While constitutionalism smacked of Revolutionary popular sovereignty, the authors of the general civil code (ABGB) of 1811 around Franz von Zeiller advertised its objectivity, universality and position above politics, turning their code into a mainstay of Habsburg statecraft. The general civil code became the default common legal system for the Monarchy's hereditary lands, but it also shaped its law schools. The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the enactment of the 1811 code whittled away the courses previously assigned to public law in Habsburg jurists’ training. Franz von Zeiller, who also designed the new legal curriculum for the Monarchy’s universities, consecrated this exclusion of public law from jurists’ lectures. The primacy of private law Zeiller’s course plan entailed was unwittingly reinforced by minister of education Leo Thun-Hohenstein, the Bohemian aristocrat turned educational reformer who coordinated the recasting of the Habsburg universities after 1848: While Neoabsolutism extended the general civil code to the lands of the Hungarian crown, Thun-Hohenstein sought to weed out Enlightenment natural law whose insidious presence at the Empire’s universities he held responsible for the Revolution. Thun-Hohenstein’s hostility to Revolutionary state law conspired with his patriotic commitment to Bohemia’s statehood: Both impulses made Thun and his collaborators stymie the teaching of Habsburg public law at the Empire’s universities. Thun-Hohenstein’s reform removed the backbone of Habsburg private law, Enlightenment natural jurisprudence. But the key position of private law in the education Habsburg jurists received as well as its reliance on the general civil code remained intact. Thun-Hohenstein's reform prepared the ground for what he had sought to curb, namely for the rise of positivism and liberalism. Thereby hangs a larger tale: Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law with its specific idea of statehood structured around the primacy of private law bore the indelible imprint of the Habsburg juristic culture Zeiller and Thun-Hohenstein had produced.
What was the Axis all about? Departing from a shared commitment to multiply composed, entangled h... more What was the Axis all about? Departing from a shared commitment to multiply composed, entangled histories of the Axis powers, an international group of scholars met in early June under the auspices of the University of Konstanz and Columbia University’s European Institute to ponder this question. In what follows I shall not provide a point-by-point synopsis of the papers but instead focus on seven salient, architectonic issues this stimulating workshop addressed.
This essay places Eugen Ehrlich and Hans Kelsen afresh in their common context, the late Habsburg... more This essay places Eugen Ehrlich and Hans Kelsen afresh in their common context, the late Habsburg Empire. It reframes Ehrlich's legal sociology and Kelsen's pure theory of law as co-original and connected responses to the problem of legal universals under conditions of fractured sovereignty and imperial diversity. At first glance, Kelsen and Ehrlich seem antipodes, an impression apparently confirmed by their prickly exchange in the 1910s: while Kelsen made universality reside in the formal features and sequences of imputation that held the normative order together, Ehrlich claimed that every normative system which purported to be meta-social and meta-cultural merely camouflaged its local conditions of emergence. Once resituated in their Habsburg environment, these strategies can be read as articulations of a broader set of common proclivities. Ehrlich's and Kelsen's proficiency in the empire's techniques of plurality management enabled them to demystify the state and to dismantle the nation: both perceived the state as a juristic construction, hence they unmasked its alleged social, cultural, and ontological unity as a delusion. The same held true for the nation: Ehrlich challenged its supremacy by showing that social relationships-"associations"-cut across national divides, while Kelsen delegitimized the nation's status as a rights-bearing collective and blurred the distinction between citizens and alien residents, working toward the civic enfranchisement of the latter. This dovetailed with Ehrlich's and Kelsen's unmaking of the distinction between private and public law: the false belief in the latter's superiority over the former served to license arbitrary rule. Both jurists deterritorialized state sovereignty by highlighting the brittleness of spatial dominion and the artificiality of political boundaries: Ehrlich and Kelsen discovered a gamut of sovereign authorities with overlapping spatial areas of jurisdiction that coexisted within the Habsburg polity. This in turn permitted them to effectively transcend the distinction between domestic and international law: while, according to Ehrlich, the state fizzled out on the local level, Kelsen redescribed it from a global perspective, turning it into a mere subordinate organ of world law. Ehrlich's legal pluralism and Kelsen's pure theory were the two most successful juristic legacies of the Habsburg polity whose imprint they bore. Both creatively reworked Habsburg constitutional reality into templates of legal order that survived the empire's demise.
Full text available at:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/imperial-diversity-fractured-sovereignty-and-legal-universals-hans-kelsen-and-eugen-ehrlich-in-their-habsburg-context/8CFF629C9336F01E583D38FCA8CF4A2C
In the Habsburg lands “positive knowledge” served as the key framework of liberal science from th... more In the Habsburg lands “positive knowledge” served as the key framework of liberal science from the 1830s because it permitted its practitioners to trace inexorable social-political progress. In the 1850s Mill’s version of positivism was translated to the Austrian lands by the classicist Theodor Gomperz. This chapter traces the rival varieties of positivism across scientific domains (the natural sciences, philology, philosophy, history, law). It demonstrates how Mill’s model of inquiry was refashioned by Ernst Mach and Franz Brentano, by the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap, Neurath), as well as by Hans Kelsen’s critical-democratic legal positivism. The final section analyzes the fin de siècle shipwreck of positivism and links it to the collapse of Austrian liberalism whose vision of benign imperial rule, society and scientific inquiry it had provided.
My contribution to "Josephinismus zwischen den Regimen" focuses on historiography to trace how th... more My contribution to "Josephinismus zwischen den Regimen" focuses on historiography to trace how the Habsburg Empire turned from a tangible reality into a phantom space of shared experiences in interwar Central Europe. Collateral heirs to the Empire, intellectuals in the early 20th century were also collateral heirs to its Enlightenment, seeking to inflect and refract a common heritage by incorporating it into their narratives of national history. I show how scholars like Josef Pekař, Jaroslav Ludvíkovský, Henrik Marczali, Elemér Máylusz, and Gyula Szekfű tackled this task and prove that older fault lines from the late Empire's knowledge culture continued to shape their work. By recovering the techniques and political imperatives of Central European historiography in those years, my chapter provides a context that is vital if we seek to make sense of Eduard Winter's and Fritz Valjavec's works.
My paper tries to unravel how universalism and globality were linked in the age of empire, and it... more My paper tries to unravel how universalism and globality were linked in the age of empire, and it uses positivism to recover this intricate relationship. Positivists felt that they witnessed a planetary crisis unleashed by the French Revolution of 1789, and this crisis prompted them to recalibrate both the spatio-temporal unity of the world and the unity of the sciences while seeking to reveal the links that existed between these two forms of totality.
My essay grounds ostensibly abstract intellectual choices and methodological precepts in their social realities, teasing out how the post-Revolutionary "world" acted as the prerequisite and working material for Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill's versions of positivism.
Auguste Comte and his followers acknowledged and appreciated cultural distinctions while Milleans tended to affirm the superiority of European civilization and to regard cultural divergences as something to be gradually diluted or obliterated. For Mill the universality of method was both epistemic and socio-political: There is only one way of emancipation for mankind, its enlightenment through European liberalism and education. Comte on the contrary relentlessly criticized colonial rule, Christian proselytizing and assumptions about the racial inferiority of non-Europeans. My paper dissects the Millean and Comtean varieties of universalism, recovers their functions for imperial rule and anticolonial resistance. Beyond that, it offers a genealogy of cultural difference, tracing its emergence as a spinoff from liberal imperialism.
My chapter ressesses the nexus between the Enlightenment and liberalism. Although primarily based... more My chapter ressesses the nexus between the Enlightenment and liberalism. Although primarily based on Habsburg Central European material, the reconstruction I offer here possesses some broader conceptual purchase: The relationship between Enlighteners and liberals has long been cast in terms of smoothly dovetailing proclivities, making the shift from the former to the latter a moment of almost imperceptible transition. My essay challenges this account: It rediscovers rival Enlightenments and traces their transformation through the Age of Revolutions.
I look at the process of conceptual engineering by which early liberals turned the Enlightenment into a venerable ancestry that lent legitimacy to their aims. The study of liberals' pedigree-making permits me reconstruct how the Enlightenment acquired its quintessentially modern traits so familiar to us today: A rationalist project predicated on natural law, anticlericalism and popular sovereignty. Liberals remade the Enlightenment in their image, and the study of this process unearths the eighteenth-century Enlightenments it eclipsed. Throughout my study, I seek to weave together the history of knowledge and intellectual culture – my chief focus is on jurists, theologians, as well as economists – with political thought and practice.
While a sprawling literature seeks to reappraise the "Age of Democratic Revolutions" in the Atlan... more While a sprawling literature seeks to reappraise the "Age of Democratic Revolutions" in the Atlantic world, these studies by and large shirk away from a sustained analysis of the religious roots and conduits of the political proclivities between the Enlightenment and post-Napoleonic ideologies. My paper seeks to initiate a rediscovery of these lineages by retrieving one such neglected site, the Catholic Church during the Revolutionary era. Here I try to flesh out the conceptual refurbishment of the Church as a “republic” under the auspices of political Jansenism.
In doing so, my contribution teases out the political significance of Jansenist primevalism with its cross-fertilisation between the foundational state of nature, the venerable Roman Republic and the pristine early Church, in its Tuscan and French contexts. It then follow this articulate and richly layered synodalism through the crucible of the French Revolution and through the nooks and crannies of Spain’s contested transformation into a constitutional state heralded by the Cortes of Cádiz.
The 1812 constitution of Cádiz can be viewed as the hallmark of a specific Catholic republicanism. As I will show in my paper, the document’s significance for the Iberian-American world as well for the Piedmontese and Neapolitan Revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century can hardly be over-estimated. By exposing its roots in political Jansenism and by discovering its gradients and trajectories across the epochal threshold of 1800, my paper seeks to offer a reappraisal of this Catholic Republicanism that situates its promoters and proclivities in a global context.
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Books by Franz Leander Fillafer
Este libro invita a explorar la compleja red de intercambios entre tradiciones historiográficas. Renovando perspectivas sobre agentes productores como escritores, intelectuales, editores y traductores, los artículos examinan sus intenciones en diversos contextos y proponen un balance sobre el estado de la disciplina en un momento de profundos cambios.
González, Martín Pedro y Juan Manuel Romero (comps.) La historia intelectual frente al desafío del "giro global"
Índice:
1. Introducción: la nueva historia intelectual y el desafío del “giro global”
Juan Manuel Romero y Martín Pedro González
2.Los orígenes de los derechos de los trabajadores: republicanismo, comercio
y la construcción de la moderna teoría social en Gran Bretaña, 1796-1805 Gregory Claeys
3. Revolución 1.0. O cómo revolución fue revolucionada
Keith Michael Baker
4. Contextualismo, historia intelectual global y neoliberalismo: una conversación con Quentin Skinner
Franz Fillafer; Julia McClure y Quentin Skinner
5. El giro internacional en la historia intelectual
David Armitage
6. ¿Un mundo conectado? De la unidad de la historia a la historia global
Franz L. Fillafer
7.El estado de la historia intelectual: lo local y lo global
Richard Whatmore
Indem es die Aufklärung von der Fixierung auf »radikale Ideen« aus Westeuropa und auf ihre angebliche Vollendung durch Revolution und Liberalismus löst, legt das Buch ein Analysemodell für die europäische Aufklärung, aber auch für ihre Transformation im 19. Jahrhundert vor.
Winter's and Valjavec's books, published in Brno/Brünn under Nazi occupation in 1943 and 1944 respectively, established “Josephinism” as a central category of research on the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Winter and Valjavec were both embroiled in Nazi rule, Winter served as a professor at the Heydrich Foundation at Prague, Valjavec held a chair at Alfred Six's Berlin academy of political science and was a member of the Einsatzgruppe D in whose activities in the Bukovina he participated. The chapters of our book show the conduits and catalysts of Enlightenment research under the impact of Nazi rule, they analyse to what extent the concepts and politics of Ost-, Südost- and Volkstumsforschung dovetailed with governmental directives, and study how Winter and Valjavec managed to garner support for their research programs after 1945 in both halves of bisected Europe: Valjavec was installed as the director of the Institut für Südostforschung in Munich, while Winter, after a brief stint at Vienna, relocated to the GDR, becoming professor at Halle and later at East Berlin.
Our book traces how Winter's and Valjavec's “Josephinism” was ensconced as a key concept for the study of the Habsburg Monarchy. It highlights that Winter's and Valjavec's concepts were shaped by their own experience of this very Monarchy and of its collapse: Both came from German-speaking families in bilingual contexts, Winter was born in North Bohemia, Valjavec grew up in the Banat and in Budapest, and their epistemes and concepts of regional scientific collaborations reflect these origins. The book looks at the fortunes of “Josephinism” in the region from the 1940s to the present. It contextualises the sprawling literature on “Josephinism” in all successor states of the Monarchy, and it fleshes out the promise and perils of its application as a basic template and instant structuring device: what can “Josephinism” reveal, what does it occlude? This reflection on "Josephinism" offers important lessons on how the diverse historical trajectories within the Monarchy can be synchronized, and about the political-cultural imperatives behind commonly used strategies of generalization, of projecting the history of one region of the Monarchy on its entirety. These matters of selection and selectivity as well as of periodization – of the sequence of Baroque, Enlightenment, and Restoration in particular – are salient issues in all chapters.
Papers by Franz Leander Fillafer
In the mid-nineteenth century German historicists like Droysen used the rejection of Comtean positivism as a convenient tool of self-authentication. Indeed the historicist agenda crystallized in response to the work of Henry T. Buckle, a devotee of Comte who garbled and misrepresented the doctrines he professed to embrace (II.).
Part III. discusses the interlocking crises of historicism and of positivism in the Fin de Siècle around 1900, here particular attention is given to the Viennese scientists and philosophers Heinrich Gomperz and Edgar Zilsel who, from the fringes of the Vienna Circle, rethought the concept of historical and natural laws in compelling and trailblazing ways.
The last part (IV.) is devoted to the scuffles over positivism in the 1960s when the Frankfurt school resurrected logical positivism as a straw-man now embodied by Karl Popper. My conclusion throws into relief how positivism was fabricated in a sequence of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural encounters (or, put less politely, purposeful misunderstandings), and how it came to serve as a precious tool of self-enhancement and demarcation in the development of the sciences since the 1830s.
My article uses Bohemian jurisprudence between the 17 th and the 20 th centuries to showcase the interpretive benefits of a relational history of Habsburg Central Europe that both moves beyond artificial national divisions and sacrosanct epochal thresholds, 1918 in particular. Since the 17 th century, Bohemia's position at the interstices between the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands made its jurisprudence a centre of sprawling innovation: Prague jurist Franz X. Neumann disputed the Holy Roman Empire's suzerainty over Bohemia and hence dismantled claims about the automatic validity of Roman law for the kingdom of St. Wenceslaus. This position at the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire turned Bohemia into a hotbed of natural law and into the chief fulcrum of Habsburg private law codification under Maria Theresia (1750s). The Bohemian ingredient also played a crucial role in Leo Thun-Hohenstein's reform of the Habsburg Monarchy's educational system in the 1850s: A Bohemian noble patriot, Thun-Hohenstein sought to extirpate natural law, which he viewed as the mainspring of Revolution and centralisation-the two menaces that subverted Bohemia's statehood within the Monarchy. Thun's hostility to pan-imperial public law and to social contract theories destroyed the validity grounds of Habsburg legal culture but reinforced the primacy of private law. Thereby Thun produced a legal positivism that depended on the categories of Pandectist private law and permeated ostensibly sharply separated "national" communities of lawyers, as I show with reference to Czech and Germanspeaking jurists in Bohemia, the schools of Jiří Pražák and Joseph Ulbrich in particular. My paper moves beyond 1918 to flesh out the Monarchy's legal and administrative legacy that cuts against the grain of programmatic De-Austrification (Odrakouštění), and discusses the longevity of the Monarchy's 1867 December constitution in post-1918 Czechoslovakia. Swallowing their pride, German nationalists of different hues retracted their pre-1918 criticisms of the constitution and rediscovered it as a weapon against the Versailles system.
Full text available at: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110653052-
023/html
Full text available at:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/imperial-diversity-fractured-sovereignty-and-legal-universals-hans-kelsen-and-eugen-ehrlich-in-their-habsburg-context/8CFF629C9336F01E583D38FCA8CF4A2C
My essay grounds ostensibly abstract intellectual choices and methodological precepts in their social realities, teasing out how the post-Revolutionary "world" acted as the prerequisite and working material for Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill's versions of positivism.
Auguste Comte and his followers acknowledged and appreciated cultural distinctions while Milleans tended to affirm the superiority of European civilization and to regard cultural divergences as something to be gradually diluted or obliterated. For Mill the universality of method was both epistemic and socio-political: There is only one way of emancipation for mankind, its enlightenment through European liberalism and education. Comte on the contrary relentlessly criticized colonial rule, Christian proselytizing and assumptions about the racial inferiority of non-Europeans. My paper dissects the Millean and Comtean varieties of universalism, recovers their functions for imperial rule and anticolonial resistance. Beyond that, it offers a genealogy of cultural difference, tracing its emergence as a spinoff from liberal imperialism.
I look at the process of conceptual engineering by which early liberals turned the Enlightenment into a venerable ancestry that lent legitimacy to their aims. The study of liberals' pedigree-making permits me reconstruct how the Enlightenment acquired its quintessentially modern traits so familiar to us today: A rationalist project predicated on natural law, anticlericalism and popular sovereignty. Liberals remade the Enlightenment in their image, and the study of this process unearths the eighteenth-century Enlightenments it eclipsed. Throughout my study, I seek to weave together the history of knowledge and intellectual culture – my chief focus is on jurists, theologians, as well as economists – with political thought and practice.
In doing so, my contribution teases out the political significance of Jansenist primevalism with its cross-fertilisation between the foundational state of nature, the venerable Roman Republic and the pristine early Church, in its Tuscan and French contexts. It then follow this articulate and richly layered synodalism through the crucible of the French Revolution and through the nooks and crannies of Spain’s contested transformation into a constitutional state heralded by the Cortes of Cádiz.
The 1812 constitution of Cádiz can be viewed as the hallmark of a specific Catholic republicanism. As I will show in my paper, the document’s significance for the Iberian-American world as well for the Piedmontese and Neapolitan Revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century can hardly be over-estimated. By exposing its roots in political Jansenism and by discovering its gradients and trajectories across the epochal threshold of 1800, my paper seeks to offer a reappraisal of this Catholic Republicanism that situates its promoters and proclivities in a global context.
Este libro invita a explorar la compleja red de intercambios entre tradiciones historiográficas. Renovando perspectivas sobre agentes productores como escritores, intelectuales, editores y traductores, los artículos examinan sus intenciones en diversos contextos y proponen un balance sobre el estado de la disciplina en un momento de profundos cambios.
González, Martín Pedro y Juan Manuel Romero (comps.) La historia intelectual frente al desafío del "giro global"
Índice:
1. Introducción: la nueva historia intelectual y el desafío del “giro global”
Juan Manuel Romero y Martín Pedro González
2.Los orígenes de los derechos de los trabajadores: republicanismo, comercio
y la construcción de la moderna teoría social en Gran Bretaña, 1796-1805 Gregory Claeys
3. Revolución 1.0. O cómo revolución fue revolucionada
Keith Michael Baker
4. Contextualismo, historia intelectual global y neoliberalismo: una conversación con Quentin Skinner
Franz Fillafer; Julia McClure y Quentin Skinner
5. El giro internacional en la historia intelectual
David Armitage
6. ¿Un mundo conectado? De la unidad de la historia a la historia global
Franz L. Fillafer
7.El estado de la historia intelectual: lo local y lo global
Richard Whatmore
Indem es die Aufklärung von der Fixierung auf »radikale Ideen« aus Westeuropa und auf ihre angebliche Vollendung durch Revolution und Liberalismus löst, legt das Buch ein Analysemodell für die europäische Aufklärung, aber auch für ihre Transformation im 19. Jahrhundert vor.
Winter's and Valjavec's books, published in Brno/Brünn under Nazi occupation in 1943 and 1944 respectively, established “Josephinism” as a central category of research on the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Winter and Valjavec were both embroiled in Nazi rule, Winter served as a professor at the Heydrich Foundation at Prague, Valjavec held a chair at Alfred Six's Berlin academy of political science and was a member of the Einsatzgruppe D in whose activities in the Bukovina he participated. The chapters of our book show the conduits and catalysts of Enlightenment research under the impact of Nazi rule, they analyse to what extent the concepts and politics of Ost-, Südost- and Volkstumsforschung dovetailed with governmental directives, and study how Winter and Valjavec managed to garner support for their research programs after 1945 in both halves of bisected Europe: Valjavec was installed as the director of the Institut für Südostforschung in Munich, while Winter, after a brief stint at Vienna, relocated to the GDR, becoming professor at Halle and later at East Berlin.
Our book traces how Winter's and Valjavec's “Josephinism” was ensconced as a key concept for the study of the Habsburg Monarchy. It highlights that Winter's and Valjavec's concepts were shaped by their own experience of this very Monarchy and of its collapse: Both came from German-speaking families in bilingual contexts, Winter was born in North Bohemia, Valjavec grew up in the Banat and in Budapest, and their epistemes and concepts of regional scientific collaborations reflect these origins. The book looks at the fortunes of “Josephinism” in the region from the 1940s to the present. It contextualises the sprawling literature on “Josephinism” in all successor states of the Monarchy, and it fleshes out the promise and perils of its application as a basic template and instant structuring device: what can “Josephinism” reveal, what does it occlude? This reflection on "Josephinism" offers important lessons on how the diverse historical trajectories within the Monarchy can be synchronized, and about the political-cultural imperatives behind commonly used strategies of generalization, of projecting the history of one region of the Monarchy on its entirety. These matters of selection and selectivity as well as of periodization – of the sequence of Baroque, Enlightenment, and Restoration in particular – are salient issues in all chapters.
In the mid-nineteenth century German historicists like Droysen used the rejection of Comtean positivism as a convenient tool of self-authentication. Indeed the historicist agenda crystallized in response to the work of Henry T. Buckle, a devotee of Comte who garbled and misrepresented the doctrines he professed to embrace (II.).
Part III. discusses the interlocking crises of historicism and of positivism in the Fin de Siècle around 1900, here particular attention is given to the Viennese scientists and philosophers Heinrich Gomperz and Edgar Zilsel who, from the fringes of the Vienna Circle, rethought the concept of historical and natural laws in compelling and trailblazing ways.
The last part (IV.) is devoted to the scuffles over positivism in the 1960s when the Frankfurt school resurrected logical positivism as a straw-man now embodied by Karl Popper. My conclusion throws into relief how positivism was fabricated in a sequence of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural encounters (or, put less politely, purposeful misunderstandings), and how it came to serve as a precious tool of self-enhancement and demarcation in the development of the sciences since the 1830s.
My article uses Bohemian jurisprudence between the 17 th and the 20 th centuries to showcase the interpretive benefits of a relational history of Habsburg Central Europe that both moves beyond artificial national divisions and sacrosanct epochal thresholds, 1918 in particular. Since the 17 th century, Bohemia's position at the interstices between the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands made its jurisprudence a centre of sprawling innovation: Prague jurist Franz X. Neumann disputed the Holy Roman Empire's suzerainty over Bohemia and hence dismantled claims about the automatic validity of Roman law for the kingdom of St. Wenceslaus. This position at the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire turned Bohemia into a hotbed of natural law and into the chief fulcrum of Habsburg private law codification under Maria Theresia (1750s). The Bohemian ingredient also played a crucial role in Leo Thun-Hohenstein's reform of the Habsburg Monarchy's educational system in the 1850s: A Bohemian noble patriot, Thun-Hohenstein sought to extirpate natural law, which he viewed as the mainspring of Revolution and centralisation-the two menaces that subverted Bohemia's statehood within the Monarchy. Thun's hostility to pan-imperial public law and to social contract theories destroyed the validity grounds of Habsburg legal culture but reinforced the primacy of private law. Thereby Thun produced a legal positivism that depended on the categories of Pandectist private law and permeated ostensibly sharply separated "national" communities of lawyers, as I show with reference to Czech and Germanspeaking jurists in Bohemia, the schools of Jiří Pražák and Joseph Ulbrich in particular. My paper moves beyond 1918 to flesh out the Monarchy's legal and administrative legacy that cuts against the grain of programmatic De-Austrification (Odrakouštění), and discusses the longevity of the Monarchy's 1867 December constitution in post-1918 Czechoslovakia. Swallowing their pride, German nationalists of different hues retracted their pre-1918 criticisms of the constitution and rediscovered it as a weapon against the Versailles system.
Full text available at: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110653052-
023/html
Full text available at:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/imperial-diversity-fractured-sovereignty-and-legal-universals-hans-kelsen-and-eugen-ehrlich-in-their-habsburg-context/8CFF629C9336F01E583D38FCA8CF4A2C
My essay grounds ostensibly abstract intellectual choices and methodological precepts in their social realities, teasing out how the post-Revolutionary "world" acted as the prerequisite and working material for Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill's versions of positivism.
Auguste Comte and his followers acknowledged and appreciated cultural distinctions while Milleans tended to affirm the superiority of European civilization and to regard cultural divergences as something to be gradually diluted or obliterated. For Mill the universality of method was both epistemic and socio-political: There is only one way of emancipation for mankind, its enlightenment through European liberalism and education. Comte on the contrary relentlessly criticized colonial rule, Christian proselytizing and assumptions about the racial inferiority of non-Europeans. My paper dissects the Millean and Comtean varieties of universalism, recovers their functions for imperial rule and anticolonial resistance. Beyond that, it offers a genealogy of cultural difference, tracing its emergence as a spinoff from liberal imperialism.
I look at the process of conceptual engineering by which early liberals turned the Enlightenment into a venerable ancestry that lent legitimacy to their aims. The study of liberals' pedigree-making permits me reconstruct how the Enlightenment acquired its quintessentially modern traits so familiar to us today: A rationalist project predicated on natural law, anticlericalism and popular sovereignty. Liberals remade the Enlightenment in their image, and the study of this process unearths the eighteenth-century Enlightenments it eclipsed. Throughout my study, I seek to weave together the history of knowledge and intellectual culture – my chief focus is on jurists, theologians, as well as economists – with political thought and practice.
In doing so, my contribution teases out the political significance of Jansenist primevalism with its cross-fertilisation between the foundational state of nature, the venerable Roman Republic and the pristine early Church, in its Tuscan and French contexts. It then follow this articulate and richly layered synodalism through the crucible of the French Revolution and through the nooks and crannies of Spain’s contested transformation into a constitutional state heralded by the Cortes of Cádiz.
The 1812 constitution of Cádiz can be viewed as the hallmark of a specific Catholic republicanism. As I will show in my paper, the document’s significance for the Iberian-American world as well for the Piedmontese and Neapolitan Revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century can hardly be over-estimated. By exposing its roots in political Jansenism and by discovering its gradients and trajectories across the epochal threshold of 1800, my paper seeks to offer a reappraisal of this Catholic Republicanism that situates its promoters and proclivities in a global context.
Full text available at: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/Institute/IKT/PDF/Publikationen/Fillafer_Kelson_Natural_Law.pdf
This essay establishes a link between the sprawling historiography on empire and the study of the Habsburg lands. Since the 1970s, historians have sought to demolish the once robust dichotomy that separated maritime from continental imperial polities on the hand, and the neat contrast between maladroit, ramshackle empires and buoyant modern states on the other. Placing the management of imperial diversity at the core of my enquiry, I try to analyze how early modern cohesive factors like religion and social rank were surreptitiously replaced by a language-based conception of nationhood.
In what follows, I argue that empires were no benign and blameless victims of hostile forces that tore them apart. Instead I seek to recover the nationalizing trajectory of empires that became part and parcel of their identity once they turned into state-building enterprises. The Habsburg Monarchy was no exception to this rule, here the proliferation of nesting nationalisms and micro-imperialisms within the protecting mold of the empire spawned a large-scale process of pacification through segregation. Enshrined by way of the various compromises (Ausgleiche) after 1867, this system left a baleful legacy of exclusionist identification: It resulted in the threefold post-1918 distinction between "state peoples", autochthonous "minorities" and foreign "immigrants" that most of the Monarchy's successor states adopted.
360 S., brosch., €19,90 (Mandelbaum Verlag, Wien)
Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss (Hrsg.)
Der erinnerte Feind
Kritische Studien zur „Türkenbelagerung“. 356 S., brosch., €19,90 (Mandelbaum Verlag, Wien)
group of scholars met in early June 2017 under the auspices of the University of Konstanz and Columbia University’s European
Institute to ponder this question. In what follows I shall not provide a point-by-point synopsis of the papers but instead focus on seven salient, architectonic issues this stimulating workshop addressed.
The more extensive, printed version of this review appeared in: Unsere Heimat: Zeitschrift für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich 84 (1-4) 2014, pp. 170–174.
Bei flüchtiger Betrachtung kann man den Eindruck gewinnen, dass die Wissenschaftslandschaft der Habsburgermonarchie während der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts allmählich in sprachgemeinschaftlich verfasste, voneinander abgekapselte Diskursinseln zerfiel, das scheint auch für die tschechische und die deutschsprachige Jurisprudenz in Böhmen zu gelten (vgl. die Teilung der Prager Universität im Jahr 1882). Der Zerfall der Monarchie bestätigt angeblich den Erfolg dieses Entflechtungsprozesses: Die nationale Wissenschaft bereitete dem Nationalstaat den Weg. Fragwürdig ist diese Sichtweise nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil sie die Abgrenzungsstrategien der zeitgenössischen Akteure reproduziert, ohne den größeren Zusammenhang zu berücksichtigen.
Dagegen versucht mein Beitrag, sowohl die synchrone Grenze zwischen den entstehenden tschechisch- und deutschsprachigen Juristenzünften als auch die diachrone Grenze zwischen der Habsburgermonarchie und ihren Nachfolgestaaten zu hinterfragen.
Auf diese Weise möchte ich zweierlei zeigen: Erstens waren die tschechisch- und deutschsprachigen Juristen in der späten Habsburgermonarchie von einem gemeinsamen, überwölbenden Denkstil geprägt (geteilte Auffassungen darüber, was einen Staat und eine liberale, auf Privatautonomie basierende Rechtsordnung ausmachte, und darüber, was sie für die Normadressaten leisten sollten, vgl. auch die Weyr- und Kelsen-Schulen in der Zwischenkriegszeit); darauf aufbauend lässt sich zweitens der Stellenwert von 1918 als scharfe Zäsur relativieren und erforschen, wie Strukturelemente und Versatzstücke der „altösterreichischen“ Rechtsordnung situativ eingesetzt wurden, um in Zentraleuropa neue Staaten und neue Reiche zu etablieren: Das gilt für die Tschechoslowakische Republik ebenso wie für ein Reich neuen Typs, den NS-Staat, dessen Juristen teilweise habsburgisch sozialisiert waren und sich bei der Zerschlagung der Tschechoslowakei diese Erfahrungen zu Nutze machen konnten.
Central European scholars and scientists creatively grasped and shaped the religious and linguistic diversity of the Habsburg imperial polity and they did so by entangling their region with the wider world; they tweaked, deracinated and readjusted practices across contexts, they compared, translated and amalgamated bodies of knowledge. The conceptual portfolio produced in the Empire linked its local plurality to global concerns and it was precisely this nexus that gave the Central European epistemic toolkit its worldwide resonance.
We contend Central European history lends itself particularly well for testing a novel approach to the history of knowledge in three regards: It enables us
• to rediscover interaction as the chief site of knowledge-making. We contend that knowledge is always co-produced; there is no such thing as pristine and pure knowledge lodged in one, single, exclusive place of origin. This emphasis entails a novel stress on brokers and mediators as the engines of knowledge circulation.
• to focus on the materiality of knowledge production instead of merely following the paper trails of epistolary exchange
• to surmount the engrained dichotomies between the West and the rest, the center and the periphery, as well as between the self and the other.
Adopting this approach, the conference deploys the most recent advances in the history of knowledge and uses them to shed new light on Habsburg Central Europe.
The conference is organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and co-hosted by the Austrian National Library and the Austrian State Archives.
Newtonianism was adapted by the Jesuit order and flourished as a central framework of the Catholic Enlightenment after the order’s demise. Catholic Newtonians midwifed secularized natural science in their struggle to defend the crucial role of the church in the Monarchy's educational system, but progressively cut the ground from under their own feet as they made the knowledge of revelation superfluous for the study of nature. After 1790, the clearly delineated system of hierarchized celestial order Newtonianism offered was mapped on the political world. It received an anti-Revolutionary imprint as it was integrated into the restorational system of science. Newtonianism continued to supply the basic premises of possible knowledge about nature in a whole set of domains (e.g. natural law) and did so also in physics, although subordinate functional parts of Newtonianism did not withstand detailed scrutiny (e.g. imponderabilia).
My paper traces the longevity of the Newtonian matrix in the Habsburg lands, up to its devastating unmaking in post-1848 Vienna (Mach, Boltzmann). Thereby the contribution highlights the multifaceted significance of Newtonianism which was at the same time a formative cultural cliché about what science should be capable of and a repository of concepts used by savants and scientists in rival domains of enquiry.
In doing so, my contribution teases out the political significance of Jansenist primevalism with its cross-fertilisation between the foundational state of nature, the venerable Roman Republic and the pristine early Church, in its Tuscan and French contexts. My talk will then follow this articulate and richly layered synodalism through the crucible of the French Revolution and through the nooks and crannies of Spain’s contested transformation into a constitutional state heralded by the Cortes of Cádiz.
The 1812 constitution of Cádiz can be viewed as the hallmark of a specific Catholic republicanism. As I will show in my paper, the document’s significance for the Iberian-American world as well for the Piemontese and Napolitan Revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century can hardly be over-estimated. By exposing its roots in political Jansenism and by discovering its gradients and trajectories across the epochal threshold of 1800, my paper seeks to offer a reappraisal of this Catholic Republicanism that situates its promoters and proclivities in a global context.
Sortieranleitungen, den "großen Erzählungen" der Nationalgeschichte. Diese großen Erzählungen verteilen Licht und Schatten, gliedern die Vergangenheit in fortschrittliche und rückwärtsgewandte Phasen, scheiden zwangsläufige Entwicklungen von
versäumten Alternativen, bieten den patriotischen Endverbrauchern Geschichtskonserven zur Erbauung und Empörung.
Diese „großen Erzählungen" zeigen auf, wie das wurde, was heute ist: sie modellieren die Inhalte der Geschichte so, dass sie auf die Gegenwart zulaufen, in Falle Zentraleuropas, der Nachfolgestaaten der Habsburgermonarchie, auf die Nationsbildung und Demokratisierung, in diesem Sinne wird die Geschichte auch räumlich auf die Gebietskerne der Staatsgebilde des 20. Jahrhunderts
zugeschnitten. Die Überlieferungsbestände und Altlasten, die aus der Habsburgermonarchie in die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts herüberreichen, prägen bis heute die Geschichtskultur aller zentraleuropäischen Länder, unter ihnen nimmt der
„Josephinismus" eine Schlüsselposition ein.
Diese Wiener Vorlesung widmet sich der großen Erzählung „Josephinismus" und ihrem Stellenwert in der österreichischen Geschichte. Als Chiffre für den Aufbruch der habsburgischen Länder in die Moderne, für Reform, Kreativität („erste Wiener
Moderne", Mozarts Wien in den 1780er Jahren), Antibarock und Antiklerikalismus, aber auch für Zwangsbeglückung durch Germanisierung und „Kolonialisierung" der Peripherien der Monarchie ist der Josephinismus ein Musterbeispiel für eine große
Erzählung.
Als eine solche Erzählung hält die Rede vom „Josephinismus" Vergangenes selektiv gegenwartsrelevant und gewinnt ihm anknüpfenswerte und verderbliche Traditionslinien ab, fungiert aber aber auch als Identitätsangebot, indem sie die eigentliche, genuine Entwicklung von wesensfremden, verfälschenden Elementen abhebt. Seit dem Vormärz, besonders akzentuiert im Fin de Siècle, ist der Josephinismus in diesem Sinne umstritten, er gilt als unösterreichischer Irrweg oder als Kern des (Deutsch-)Österreichischen (Jung Wien, konservative Revolution, Austrofaschismus) und wird dem maria-theresianischen Mythos, dem barockverhafteten homo austriacus gegenübergestellt.
Unsere Wiener Vorlesung wird die großen Züge dieser Entwicklung in der Geschichtskultur Österreichs darstellen und sie mit jener der Nachbarländer, vor allem Tschechiens, Ungarns und Italiens vergleichen. Zudem wirft diese Wiener Vorlesung anhand des Josephinismus die Frage auf, wie man österreichische Geschichte
schreiben soll.
Unsere Veranstaltung durchbricht dank ihrer zentraleuropäischen Perspektive die nationalhistoriographische Engführung, die der österreichischen Geschichtsschreibung immer noch häufig anhaftet, indem sie einerseits forschungspragmatische und erkenntnisstrategische Routinen, die Übertragbarkeit regionalhistorisch gewonnener Ergebnisse auf die Geschichte der Gesamtmonarchie (vor allem am Beispiel der Lombardei und Böhmens als Laboratorien und Musterländer des Josephinismus) untersucht, und andererseits den Josephinismus als Paradebeispiel für die regimeübergreifend einsetzbaren Leitbegriffe der Geisteswissenschaften darstellt.
Von Eduard Winter und Fritz Valjavec in den 40er Jahren im Kontext der Ost- und Südostforschung, des Grenzlanddeutschtums sowie der katholischen Reichsidee als Forschungsbegriff geprägt, blieb der Josephinismus über die Regimeumbrüche in Zentraleuropa hinweg ein unentbehrliches Konzept zur Modellierung der Geschichte der Region. Eduard Winters Lebenslauf vom Heydrich-Stiftungsprofessor im besetzten Prag zum hochdekorierten DDR-Wissenschaftler und Akademiemitglied in Ostberlin und Fritz Valjavecs Karriere als Direktor des Südostforschungsinstituts in München nach 1945, die es ihm erlaubte, seine früheren Erkenntnisse in den Dienst der vom Kalten Krieg diktierten Gegnerforschung zu stellen, belegen die regimeübergreifenden Konjunkturen solcher Deutungsmuster.
Somit erlaubt es die Beschäftigung mit dem Josephinismus, das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Ideologie und Politik im Zentraleuropa des 20. Jahrhunderts präziser als bisher zu erfassen, zugleich aber die vermeintlich "nationalen" Geschichtsbilder in der Region anhand der zentralen Elemente Barock, Aufklärung und Restauration von ihren
häufig übersehenen gemeinsamen Grundlagen her zu durchleuchten.