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THE INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES OF
MODERN GOVERNANCE
——o—
BORBÁLA ZSUZSANNA TÖRÖK
Staatenkunde or descriptive statistics has played a marginal role as a kind of
appendix in scholarly forays into Hungarian history of culture, education and
scientific knowledge, although the sheer variety of research contexts is im¬
pressive. The first such context is the history of “scientific”, that is, modern
quantitative statistics. To the extent descriptive works on Hungary were men¬
tioned at all, they were regarded as “predecessors” of the modern practice, but
not regarded as pertaining to a scholarly discipline in its own right, with its
own intellectual, academic and political background.
Another context of emergence for Staatenkunde was the quantifying sorts
of social history and historical sociology. Demographers, economic historians
and “cliometricians” have recognized the research potential of the significant
statistical literature produced on Hungary in the first half of the “long” nine¬
teenth century. However, after descriptive statistics was eliminated from the
legal curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century, attention faded in the
scientific history of the discipline.
Newer research on Staatenkunde has brandmarked it as rather erratic and
unreliable.’ Nevertheless, the discipline also figured as the historical back¬
ground of modern legal thinking’ and last, but not least, on the margin of
research on public administration of the eighteenth century.? It is thus known
that the remolding of Hungarian legal education under the auspices of the
! BENDA, Gyula, Fényes Elek forrásai, in V. Bácskai — J. Gyurgyák — G. Kévér (eds.), Tarsada¬
lomtörténeti tanulmányok, Budapest, Osiris, 2006, 113-129.
? GÖncZzı, Katalin, Die europäischen Fundamente der ungarischen Rechtskultur. Juristischer Wis¬
senstransfer und nationale Rechtswissenschaft in Ungarn zur Zeit der Aufklärung und im Vor¬
märz, Frankfurt, Klostermann, 2008.
3 The great exception is the oeuvre of Róbert Horváth, who studied the pre-1848 era in the history
of Hungarian Staatenkunde in great detail and with keen theoretical knowledge. Some examples
of a large body of his writings: A magyar leirö statisztikai irany fejlödese, Budapest, Központi
Statisztikai Hivatal, 1966.; A közgazdasagi elemzes Berzeviczy Gergely müveiben, Szeged, Jözsef
* 183 ¢