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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).
Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Titel
- Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
- Untertitel
- And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Autoren
- Per Pippin Aspaas
- László Kontler
- Verlag
- Brill
- Ort
- Leiden
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-41683-3
- Abmessungen
- 15.5 x 24.1 cm
- Seiten
- 492
- Kategorien
- Naturwissenschaften Physik
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Acknowledgments VII
- List of Illustrations IX
- Bibliographic Abbreviations X
- Introduction 1
- 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37
- 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91
- 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134
- 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172
- 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209
- 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus andDebating the Parallax 258
- 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305
- 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344
- Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394
- Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J 398
- Bibliography 400
- Index 459