Seite - 327 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

327Disruption of Old Structures times it was impossible to rise to nobility by writing and the pen in a nation, which could neither write nor read, but only fought, triumphed, plundered, and ruled.” But Bessenyei adds immediately that “all nations in the world, which have since developed arts and sciences, began their nobilities in this way […].”45 An appendix entitled “Egész Európa’ formája a xidik Százban” (The form of the whole of Europe in the eleventh century—excerpted from Vol- taire’s Essai sur les moeurs, chapters 39–46) is intended to demonstrate that in those times Hungarians were no more barbarous than other European nations. “If you observe only Hungary in the eleventh century, you will find that it dealt improperly with its kings; but was there anything other nations did not com- mit, although they had been Christians for a long time?”46 Religious war and forced conversion is also described as the order of the day. The ubiquity of vio- lent passions and ignorance was directly related to the overall rusticity of man- ners: “The sum of customs and manners was excessive eating and drinking, pillage, recklessness in combat, and cruelty.”47 Thus far, this is more or less the standard Enlightenment narrative48 of the feudal past, with the potential of the assessment of the present in equally stan- dard terms of enlightened patriotism. Bessenyei indeed hinted at the anachro- nistic distribution of social power and privilege in eighteenth-century Hungary: in the beginning, the plowman paid taxes to the bearer of arms in return for his own pro- tection. So, in old times everything was based on services; but since ser- vants became masters without bearing arms, the one part always obeys, and the other always commands. […] This great nobility was once a standing army; now they lay idle in their homes […].49 Bessenyei, however, nowhere arrived at the explicit conclusion that noble priv- ileges, being no longer justified, ought to be eliminated, although—as the 45 György Bessenyei, A magyar nemzetnek szokásairul […], in Bessenyei, Összes művei: Társadalombölcseleti írások 1771–1778, ed. Péter Kulcsár (Budapest: Argumentum-Aka- démiai Kiadó, 1992), 89–154, here 96. 46 György Bessenyei, “Egész Európa’ formája a xidik Százban,” in Bessenyei, Társadalomböl- cseleti írások, 155–66, here 164. 47 Bessenyei, “Egész Európa’ formája,” 163. 48 For this concept and its application to mainstream Western European material, see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, esp. vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 49 Bessenyei, A magyar nemzetnek szokásairul, 153.