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ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND HUNGARY At this point it seems worth considering in what sense this geography — and also Humboldt’s geography — can be considered new. It admittedly set itself against the discourse of Enlightenment “world histories”, that is, the late 18'-century genre of geographia mundi: Geography, as it is conceived today [...] — to quote Nouvelles Annales des Voyages from 1839 - is not restricted any more to a brief and dry description of places; to some paragraphs on the rivers and the mountains; to an approximative survey of the products of a region, its natural and artificial frontiers: ... [It] has a wider scope: it aims at giving an exact account of not only what exists, but also the events that affected it, and the events that could modify it; it aims also at showing the manners (moeurs) of a people, so it tells what successive variations these manners have undergone through time, it reveals the appropriate reasons for it, it teaches us which were the most glorious days [of the people concerned] and which the most miserable ones, how the population has increased, or how and why it has decreased, which period has made its wealth grow, and how its sources have been used up [...] [This] geography [...] is universal, because it draws on religion, history, the arts (les arts) and manners of a nation, and so in this way nothing is alien to it...” Probably the most important aspect of the new geography was that it was proposed as the science of something social and collective, something which was held to be different from the sphere of the natural environment, but which was treated - and this is very important - as included in it, as embedded in it. (A similar idea of “social geography” was taken up later by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and through him, the historians of the Annales-circle themselves in France at the beginning of the 20" century.) Finally, the third idea which was communicated by Humboldt’s works to Hungary was his concept of history. In general, Humboldt relied on the stadial concept of the Enlightenment: he conceived history as a universal and also unilinear development advancing from the stade of savages to, the stage of barbarians, to that of half-barbarians, and finally to that of so-called civilizations. However, another of his scientific obsessions modified the general idea of development and made it less linear, less straight, and altogether less rigid. This was the role that Nature could play in the formation of human societies. As regards the American Indians, for example, Humboldt argued that just as Nature provides multiple centers (or foyers) for the distribution of 2 A. E.: Statistique de l’industrie française. Exposition des produits de 1839, 63-64. The citation is the first paragraph of the article; the English translation is mine: I. Sz. K. 23 See Claude Blanckaert: Geographie et anthropologie: une rencontre necessaire (XVIII*XIX® siécle), Ethnologie française No. 4, (Octobre-Décembre), 2004, 661-670. + 403 +
