Page - 326 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7326 Among many other literary pursuits and genres, Bessenyei was active in the field of philosophical history,42 translating and adapting texts by Voltaire, Claude-François-Xavier Millot (1726–85), Louis-Sébastien Jacquet de Malzet (1715–1800), and Vaissète, and writing original works devoted to the history of Hungarians in the period of settlement and state foundation in a European context, through a comparative analysis of manners, laws, and institutions. In his A magyar néző (Hungarian spectator [1779]), Bessenyei surveyed the histo- ry of the world, from a Hungarian perspective, in a thoroughly Voltairian framework. He proposed to give an account of the successive stages of the “mitigation” of rude manners, resulting from religion and learning, but also claimed that military glory and polite letters, rather than being antagonistic, could mutually supplement one another.43 This, of course, dovetailed with his overall conviction that vera nobilitas, “true nobility” could derive from profi- ciency in letters as well as arms-bearing, a claim he made to urge a re- evaluation of the social roles of the nobility, which he still regarded as the chief repository of improvement—although it also depended on “emulation between the great and the little.”44 Then, in A magyar nemzetnek szokásairul, erköltseirül, ur- alkodásának modjairul, törvényeirül, és nevezetesb viselt dolgairul (The customs, manners, modes of government, laws, and important deeds of the Hungarian nation [1778]), he again provided a set of present-oriented historical reflec- tions, intended as a historical underpinning of his program. Achievements by the sword and by the pen are represented, in a somewhat labored fashion, as two equally feasible paths to ennoblement—although Bessenyei held that among certain circumstances, such as in eleventh-century Hungary and Europe as a whole, the one took precedence over the other. His point in this work is, ultimately, the parallel development of society in Hungary and Europe in the past, and the consequent chance to re-establish synchronicity for Hun- gary with European progress in the present. (It is tempting to recognize here an association with the notion advanced by Montesquieu, that the shared “deep structures” of European societies predestine them to progress toward a similar present and future, despite the empirical variations within the overall system of monarchy based on intermediary powers.) “It seems as if the Hungarian no- bility originated fully from warfare. It could not have been otherwise, for in old 42 On the views of Bessenyei and his fellow “bodyguard writers” on history, see Bíró, A felvi- lágosodás, 161–86; and Penke, Filozofikus világtörténetek és történetfilozófiák, 161–82. 43 György Bessenyei, Magyarság; A Magyar Néző, Magyar irodalmi ritkaságok 16 (Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1932), 17. 44 György Bessenyei, A Holmi, ed. Ferenc Bíró, György Kókay, and Andor Tarnai (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983), 16.