Page - 307 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

307Disruption of Old Structures during the later 1770s and the 1780s, the increasing number of German- language publications by him, and so on—may be helpful to interpret as a set of responses to the new circumstances in which a Jesuit scientist in the Habsburg capital found himself after the suppression of his order in 1773. More broadly, they were reactions to the shifting relationship between the Viennese government and the various religious and secular groups and organizations that constituted a challenge to its increasing efforts at consolidating the com- posite parts of the monarchy as a quasi-imperial Gesamtstaat.3 The governmental, administrative, and economic reforms adumbrated in the Habsburg monarchy during the first half of the reign of Maria Theresa were closely tied up with the lessons drawn from the wars it was compelled to fight. International competitiveness depended on a better alignment, mobilization, and utilization of internal resources, which at the same time could also be as- sociated with unfolding ideals of the state’s commitment to the public weal. The instruments to attain such ends—administrative streamlining, economic protectionism, customs regulations, the suppression of tax exemptions, and a general endeavor on the part of the state bureaucracy to reach out directly to the subject over the heads of privileged “intermediary powers”—were being tested on Austrian and Bohemian grounds already from the 1740s onwards. This further opened the gap between these areas and Hungary as far as their integration in the structures of the monarchy is concerned. On the one hand, historical experience warned that Hungary would remain “different” (despite the substantial support that the Habsburgs drew from the “insurrection”— personal military service: a kind of taxation through shedding one’s blood—of the Hungarian nobility throughout the War of Austrian Succession and the 3 The literature on Habsburg enlightened absolutism (or “despotism”) is vast. On the concept and its history, see Derek Beales, “Philosophical Kingship and Enlightened Despotism,” in Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Tauris, 2005), 28– 59, also printed in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 497–524. Besides relevant chapters in Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs, already mentioned, see H.M. [Hamish Marshall] Scott, “Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–1790,” in Enlightened Ab- solutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H.M. Scott (London: Macmillan, 1990), 145–88; Scott, “The Problem of Government in Habsburg Enlightened Ab- solutism,” in Europa im Zeitalter Mozarts, ed. Moritz Csáky and Walter Pass (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1995), 252–64. The topic has often been discussed comprehensively with the principal actors in the focus. See Franz A.J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Derek Beales, Joseph ii, vol. 1, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa 1741–1780, vol. 2, Against the World 1780–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1987–2009); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2017).