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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 contemporary 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 Hungarian, 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 Staatenkunde among other disciplines at the law academies and at the university of Hungary, already confirms the quick spread of new methods and the homogenization 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 proliferated 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 arithmetic, 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 Statistical, 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 country, 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. * 186 +
