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BORBÁLA ZSUZSANNA TÖRÖK Surprisingly, given the increasingly professional renderings of the structure, social layering and dynamics of domestic population, stock components of late eighteenth-century Staatenkunde, are also preserved. The most prominent are nationality and the rendering of collective identity “markers”. Despite the fact that Hungary did not have a statistical office of its own before 1868, the descriptions comprise a contingent of growing numerical data, inserted into increasingly diversified rubrics. To what extent these data are reliable; is a different question. All-in-all, the stability of structure and style of descriptive statistics remains unchallenged throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. It stands for a stability of political vision, rooted in the North German Protestant academic tradition, whose ideal was the paternalist and caretaking Polizeystaat. It is after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise that substantial criticism — and substantial anti-Habsburg bias — is voiced about the dry and seemingly objective descriptions of Staatenkunde, signalling also its dissolution as a discipline. " 15 KONEK, Sandor, Az Ausztriai-Magyar Monarchia statistikai kezikönyve. Az ujabb viszonyok szerint teljesen átdolgozott, 2nd ed, Pest, Heckenast, MDCCCLXVIII. 16 Tam thinking in the first place of the passionate account by the historian Mihaly Horvath. His criticism of Austrian “despotism* reflects his thorough training in the methods of Staatenkunde, while he contests vehemently on the ground of national sovereignty the legal entitlement of the monarchy to the “despotic governance“ of its Hungarian half. HORVÄTH, Huszonöt ev, Vol. 1,5. * 196 "
