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BORBÁLA ZSUZSANNA TÖRÖK
anti-Habsburg edge since the mid-nineteenth century." While acknowledging
the fact that peregrinating Protestants feature prominently in the contem¬
porary intellectual elite, and indeed contributed to the effervescence of local
intellectual life, a balanced study has to take account also of the educational
culture of the Catholic confession, which not only constituted the majority of
rank-and-file students, but also displayed patterns of circulation in the ambit
of the Habsburg system of higher learning. To what extent these internal Hun¬
garian, Austrian, Croatian, Bohemian, and Galician peregrinations contributed
to the circulation of new learning within the bounds of the Habsburg realms,
is still little known. Yet, my survey on the academic staff, who taught Staaten¬
kunde among other disciplines at the law academies and at the university of
Hungary, already confirms the quick spread of new methods and the homogeni¬
zation of teaching material on Hungarian soil, irrespective of the confessional
background, due to the incentive of the Viennese educational policies.
In the age of “philosophic travel”, Staatenkunde as a learned practice prolif¬
erated not only in its territory of origin, the Protestant North German states,
but, already in the last decades of the 18th century, in all of German-speaking
Europe, and also in St Petersburg, the Italian states, the Netherlands, France (!)
and even Britain. The last is better known for the practice of political arithme¬
tic, yet no less a figure than the Scottish scholar Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835)
provides a remarkable definition of statistics as a descriptive science, which
will be made known on the Continent through the mediation of August Ludwig
Schlözer (1735-1809):
“Many people were at first surprised at my using the new words Statistics and Statis¬
tical, and it was supposed, that some term in our own language might have expressed
the same meaning. But in the course of a very extensive tour through the northern
parts of Europe, which I happened to take in 1786, I found, that in Germany they
were engaged in a species of political inquiry, to which they had given the name of
Statistics; and though I apply a different idea to that word, for by Statistical meant in
Germany an inquiry for the purpose of ascertaining the political strength of a coun¬
try, or questions respecting matters of state; whereas the idea I annex to the term, is
an inquiry into the state of a country for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of
happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement (...)”°
See in particular HORVÁTH, Mihály, Huszonöt év Magyarország történelméből 1823-tól 1848-ig.
Vol. 1, Pest, Ráth, 2nd ed, 1868, 52.
° SINCLAIR, Sir John, The Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-1798, Vol. 8, Edinburgh, William
Creech, XIU, cited by SCHLOZER, August Ludwig, Theorie der Statistik, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 1794, 16-17.
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