Page - 317 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

317Disruption of Old Structures Counts Ludwig (1721–80) and Karl (1739–1813)—that led to von Sonnenfels’s recruitment to his university chair.19 In other words, in the given circumstanc- es these qualities supported his candidacy for a position as a state servant per- forming strategic tasks in state-building, while at the same time they were deeply rooted in his ability to apply critical common sense to public affairs— which he also did in his simultaneous capacity as a public intellectual. Com- mitted to the ideals of the freedom of expression and the press, and taking advantage of the relaxation of censorship, in 1765 von Sonnenfels launched the first significant Viennese equivalent of European moral weeklies, under a title—Der Mann ohne Vorurtheil (The man without prejudice)—that speaks for itself. This was the first German periodical raising social and political issues directly,20 including the improvement of the condition of peasants, the sup- pression of guilds, restrictions on torture, and the abolition of the death penalty—all based on assumptions about the monarch’s legislative obliga- tions deduced from natural law and humanitarian principles. The journal ceased to exist in 1767; in 1769, a new Penal Code—aptly (nick)named Nemesis Theresiana—if anything, only aggravated the regulations on torture and the death penalty; and von Sonnenfels was ordered to stop discussing these issues. In the formal protest he submitted, he stressed his obedience to the existing laws, but also his view that the free criticism of their shortcomings was a key condition to improvement in the administration of the state. That he contin- ued to voice and publish his views on the subject had a part in the abolition of torture in 1776. In a like fashion, from the 1760s on the government demonstrated an in- creasing awareness of the importance of appealing to and shaping a critical public opinion in canvassing its reform agendas by commissioning or sponsor- ing publications, whether in opposition to the Hungarian diet or concerning the dissolution of monasteries. In accordance with this recognition, a further relaxation of censorship accompanied the ecclesiastical reforms at the begin- ning of Joseph ii’s reign, in order to enable his supporters to counter the cleri- cal protests against these measures. One of the collateral effects was a much greater exposure of the public to the large stock of literature formerly indexed, including most classics and lesser works of the European Enlightenment. In addition, these developments elicited a veritable Broschürenflut, “flood of 19 Grete Klingenstein, “Between Mercantilism and Physiocracy: Stages, Modes, and Func- tions of Economic Theory in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1748–1763,” in State and Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. Charles W. Ingrao (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994), 181–214. 20 Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend: Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen Mor- alischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), 141.