Page - 308 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7308 Seven Years’ War). On the other hand, it was clear that the state could not af- ford the luxury of dispensing with the resources of its vast and potentially rich eastern half. While keeping up the momentum of reform in the western prov- inces, it was crucial to generate a similar process in the east as well. By the 1760s, a full-fledged know-how of the operation of the reform-minded, bureau- cratic, enlightened state was in place at Vienna: Polizeywissenschaft, anchored in the university curriculum and textbooks of Joseph von Sonnenfels, commit- ted to exploring and inculcating the requirements of the safety and conve- nience (Sicherheit und Bequemlichkeit) of the citizens and thereby achieving the higher ends of the state (Staatszweck).4 Central to this administrative (as against rights-and-obligations-based) vi- sion of the state and government was the idea that the existence of all excep- tions and exemptions, together with the social groups whose status is defined in terms of such special privileges, is in principle antithetical to the attainment of the above-mentioned goals; that in the eyes of the state all citizens are to be regarded as individuals, bound to the state as individuals, not as members of any legally distinct group or estate. One of the natural targets of policies based on these principles was the Catholic Church. Catholicism as a moral cement and as a force connecting subjects with their ruler in a shared spiritual experi- ence was still regarded as highly important. However, patriotic loyalty elicited by the state’s competence in providing, through good laws and their rigorous execution, for the “safety and convenience” of its citizens, began to loom as large on the minds of the architects of the Viennese reforms as the quasi- religious devotion to the dynasty. At the same time, Catholicism as an orga- nized hierarchy with a separate structure of allegiances and patronage (which 4 On Polizeywisswenschaft in the larger context of the development of the sciences of the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Central Europe, see Keith Tribe, “Cameralism and the Sciences of the State,” in Goldie and Wokler, Cambridge History, 525–46; on von Son- nenfels as an emblematic figure in the tradition, see Helmut Reinalter, ed., Joseph von Sonnenfels (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988); Simon Karstens, Lehrer—Schriftsteller—Staatsreformer: Die Karriere des Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733–1817) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011); on the aspects summarized here, see László Kontler, “Po- lizey and Patriotism: Joseph von Sonnenfels and the Legitimacy of Enlightened Monarchy in the Gaze of Eighteenth-Century State Sciences,” in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Mod- ern Europe, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 75–91, 232–36 (notes); on the practical impact of von Sonnenfels’s courses and textbook, see Olga Khavanova, “Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Courses and the Making of the Habsburg Bureaucracy,” Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017): 54–73. On how the consideration of the ordering func- tion of the state was also connected with “statistics” in the sense of the science of the state based on data collection and numbers, see several studies in Gunhild Berg, Marcus Twell- mann, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds., Berechnen/Beschreiben: Praktiken statistischen (Nicht-)Wissens 1750–1850 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015).