Oldal 195 [195]
THE INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES OF MODERN GOVERNANCE
that the country badly needs "Entwickelung und Kultur,"? so that Hungary
could be among the first-ranked powers of Europe. However, while the openly
pro-Josephist Schwartner admonished the Hungarian nobility for clinging to
their “old-fashioned privileges,” Berzeviczy, with a keen eye on the economic
inequality between his patria and the hereditary lands, implicitly accused the
Viennese government of menacing the well-being of the country:
“Landwirtschaft, Industrie und Commerz, wodurch das Volk sich Unterhalt und
Wohlstand verschafft, wodurch der Staat machtig wird, erfordern also eine vorziig¬
liche Fürsorge der Regierung, und jede Einschränkung des Unterhalts eines Volks,
jedes Hinderniß siner Industrie, und Commerzes: untergräbt dessen physisches und
politisches Daseyn.”°*
As a systematic and encyclopaedic discipline, Staatenkunde in Hungary was
originally a product of the Protestant North German universities.*° It incor¬
porated a long tradition of state description, beginning with the rendering of
the whereabouts of the Aristotelian polis, extended by the geographical atlases
and cosmographies of the Renaissance and on through the Enlightenment, and
by the emergence of focused attention on information on other states that had
such an impact on state affairs in the Venetian and Florentine republics, up
until the institutionalization of this body of knowledge at the universities of
Helmstedt (by Conring), Halle (Gassner, etc.), Jena and, above all, Göttingen.
Achenwall was the first scholar that had attempted to transform this ad hoc
genre of state description into a systematic and “scientific“ description of the
state as a system.
The system of description has often been characterized as a quasi-mechan¬
ical transmission of the so-called “Aristotelian division” of the natural and
political realm into a “material cause” (Staatsgrundmächte, including Land und
Leute), a “formal cause”, and finally into a “final cause”.% More recently this
has been seen as a conscious design for rendering the interlocking natural and
the cultural-political realms of the state." The chief structuring of the “sta¬
tistical” data thus described first the human and physical geography realm of
“nature” (the latter complete with the description of the climate of the state,
the inhabitants and the natural riches of the land). For the completion of a
BERZEVICZYy, Ungarns Industrie und Kommerz, 8.
34 Tbid., 120.
More recently about the Göttinger tradition see GIERL, Geschichte, 161.
HoRvÁTH, A magyar leíró statisztikai irány fejlődése,
37 See GIERL, Geschichte, 177.
* 193 ¢