Page - 324 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7324 Montesquieu’s oeuvre, this was substantially owing in general to his analysis of monarchy in the Spirit of the Laws (1748) as a system dependent on the vitality of “subordinate or intermediary powers,” and in particular to his illustration of this point in a remarkable passage of book 8, Chapter 9 by a tribute to the Hungarian nobility, which—despite the endeavor of the house of Austria to “oppress” it—“forgetting the injuries done to themselves, took up arms to avenge her cause.”38 This was understood by enlightened Hungarians as a ges- ture both to the virtue and honor of their political elite and to the liberties enshrined in the assemblage of their ancient customs and statutes, soon to be reinterpreted as a constitution established on the principle of the separation of powers.39 The injunction of the Hungarian masonic constitutions to brethren— especially those in the legal profession—to inquire into the best form of government and into the nature of their country’s constitution was an acknowledgment of the quasi-biblical status of Montesquieu’s text among them, with the implication that the pursuit of the enlightened goals of freema- sonry was compatible with the preservation of Hungary’s political system and autonomy. From this vantage point, the administrative reforms of Joseph ii in the mid-1780s—the German-language decree, already mentioned; the imposi- tion of a second tier of administration by “districts,” packed by reliable bureau- crats, over the traditional institutions of self-government by counties; the commissioning of a country-wide census, suspected of anticipating a circum- scribing of the nobility’s tax privileges—were viewed with anxiety, and caused the kinds of stirrings described by Forster. The completion of the census was an apparent success for Joseph ii, but together with the creation of the district system it created an irreparable breach between him and the counties, whereas the language decree was not only impossible to put into practice but also gave impetus to the unfolding movement for the modernization and the embellishment of the Hungarian language. This endeavor was not entirely new in the mid-1780s. Its hotbed was Habsburg enlightened absolutism itself, providing training for many young Hungarian nobles in the Theresianum or the Royal Hungarian Bodyguard in Vienna, and employing them on missions into the western centers of social 38 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 119. The passage commemorates the Hungarian nobility’s spectacular show of support for Maria Theresa at the outset of the War of Austrian Succession. 39 László Péter, “Montesquieu’s Paradox of Freedom and Hungary’s Constitutions 1790– 1990,” History of Political Thought 16, no. 1 (1995): 77–104, republished in Péter, Hungary’s Long Nineteenth Century: Constitutional and Democratic Traditions in a European Perspec- tive, ed. Miklós Lojkó (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 153–82.