Oldal 185 [185]
OCR
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 impressive. The first such context is the history of “scientific”, that is, modern quantitative statistics. To the extent descriptive works on Hungary were mentioned 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” nineteenth 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 background 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.), Tarsadalomtörténeti tanulmányok, Budapest, Osiris, 2006, 113-129. ? GÖncZzı, Katalin, Die europäischen Fundamente der ungarischen Rechtskultur. Juristischer Wissenstransfer und nationale Rechtswissenschaft in Ungarn zur Zeit der Aufklärung und im Vormärz, 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 ¢
