To Be Born English

“Why was I not born English? I would like my home to be England. We Hungarians, who do we think we are, with our loud words of freedom? It is a trifle, our liberty,” complained Gábor Döbrentei (1785–1851) to Count József Dessewffy (1771–1843) in a letter he wrote in 1816. How seriously he meant these words is shown by the fact that the last sentence of the excerpt was originally written in English. Döbrentei was the editor of one of the most significant Hungarian cultural journals, the Erdélyi Muzéum [Museum of Transylvania]. The reason behind the desperation in his letter was that even though he wanted to find the most proper and warmest words to commemorate the nobility and generosity of the Muzéum's sponsor, Dessewffy, in doing so, he had to bear in mind censorship and the deletions his writing would be subject to because of it. This meant that his text was “only filled with more joyful words of praise where it [censorship] was forgotten in the heat of the moment.”Footnote ¹ Döbrentei, who condemned censorship while at the same time subjecting himself to it, could rest assured that the conservative Count Dessewffy, a theoretical opponent of censorship, was a follower of the English-style freedom of the press.

Censorship was a grave problem for many in those days. There are many historical examples: Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), a significant author of his era, was writing his travelogue, Erdélyi levelek [Letters from Transylvania] for decades;Footnote ² one of Dessewffy's odes had to be cut out of a printed edition of the Felső Magyar-Országi Minerva [Minerva of northern Hungary] after completion in 1825; and important political treatises had to be published abroad.Footnote ³ However, we should also consider the fact that the institution of censorship at that time was subject to change in terms of area as well as structure: it could be strict or permissive, enlightened or even anti-Enlightenment. Let us consider the differences between the Josephinist Studien- und Bücherzensur Hofkomission under the leadership of Gottfried van Swieten and the Polizei-Zensur-Hofstelle under Franz I.Footnote ⁴ The censor could be anyone, from a well-respected and highly ranked public servant, to an officer who knew little about reading manuscripts. We should also keep in mind that censors would evidently stop essays written about freedom of the press from being published, which led to a situation where the arguments against censorship could be found in texts written in favor of it.Footnote ⁵

The life of Count József Dessewffy is exceptional in this respect. Dessewffy was one of the most influential conservative politicians and authors of the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶ In his youth he was keen on the Josephinist reforms (including Joseph II's famous relaxation of censorship). Later, he attended five diets as a deputy of the Tabula statuum et ordinum [House of Commons], even though he could have been a senator in the Tabula magnatum [House of Lords] due to his social ranking.Footnote ⁷ He was one of the leaders of the opposition to the Habsburg court in his younger years but later became a conservative critic of the so-called “age of reforms” after the 1825/27 diet. He was a sponsor of Hungarian culture and a poet and a novelist who could read Hungarian, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, English, French, and Italian. He often voiced his opinions on censorship and freedom of the press in his letters. He meant to publish a private letter he wrote in 1822 about the advantages of abolishing censorship in the Tudományos Gyűjtemény [Scientific collection], but it was naturally turned down by the censors. When the king terminated the diet of 1825/27, he called a regnicolaris deputatio (hereafter called deputation) to prepare the next diet.Footnote ⁸ The Deputatio publico-politico [public law subcommittee], of which Dessewffy was a member, prepared a bill on the regulation of censorship to which Dessewffy attached an opinion, Votum Separatum, that was much longer than the original bill itself. This Latin text was published in 1830 in the edition summarizing the committee's work and was sent out to the counties for comments. The censors could not or did not dare stop the legal text from being printed; the emperor summoned the committee and the texts written there consisted of the official responses to his questions. The text was not allowed to be published in Hungarian (we only have a translated manuscript) and could only be published abroad in German (in Leipzig). The counties debated the Votum separatum and published their opinions. The noble estates of Trencsén County “announced the worthy count as deserving our country's gratitude in a public sentence.”Footnote ⁹ It was not long before the comments arrived: the work of an unknown author in Rozsnyó (now Rožňava, Slovakia) in 1830 and a treatise by Pál Kis (1793–1847), a Hungarian literature and language teacher of the Theresianum in Vienna, who was a censor himself. József Ponori Thewrewk (1793–1870) published his Hazafiúi elmélkedések [Patriotic meditations], in which he argued against Dessewffy, in 1830. Finally, Dessewffy's son, Aurél (1808–42), wrote an essay in French in the second half of the thirties, to which his father replied at length in writing.

We are lucky to have the works and letters of a conservative thinker who was in favor of freedom of the press as well as a relatively large number of responses to these missives. The conditions in which these were written, their publicity, and audience varied a great deal. Dessewffy presented different content and styles in his private letters, depending to whom they were addressed and which country's freedom of the press was at issue; in his article, meant for the Tudományos Gyűjtemény; and in the commentary written to a bill, which reached beyond the counties to the court and in fact all the way to the emperor. He also took a different approach when debating with his son. Nevertheless, these temporally different expressions of opinion outline a consistently held legal and anthropological system of arguments, from which different points are emphasized in different discussions. Dessewffy's view was just one of the conservative enlightened views on censorship. The present work is concerned with which different faces of Hungarian conservatism we can discover throughout this debate.

The Rabbit and the Hunter: The Problem of Freedom of the Press in Letters

There are numerous references made to the inhibiting force of censorship on the spreading of human enlightenment. In 1810, inspired by the sight of the grandly illuminated town of Eperjes (now Prešov, Slovakia) to honor the king on his name day, Dessewffy wrote a short epigram to Francis I:

Dessewffy made the following comment on the verse when he sent it to the author Ferenc Kazinczy: “This epigram was written according to Lessing's theory and includes both expectation and exhibition. But this does not mean that it is good, what's more, it may be so bad that it could light a dark room for me all the way to Munkács and it still remains true that no one respects his Majesty more than I do. It is also true however that censorship here is not too liberal and that moderate light will have trouble in many a subject trying to light the endless gloom, the closest neighbor of darkness.”Footnote ¹¹ For Dessewffy, culture, understood in the contrast of light and darkness, aims not at human happiness but at moderation. Censorship brings gloom, which is next door to darkness. This means that those who greet their beloved emperor with real light (the Sun) instead of an artificial one (a candle) will become political prisoners in Munkács (now Мукачеве, Ukraine) all the same.Footnote ¹²

Candlelight had a different meaning in a letter he wrote to Gábor Döbrentei on 6 December 1815; in this he criticized censorship, which is terrified of fire, disorder, and rebellion and extinguishes every candle to avoid these: “we shall put out all candles as they could set the whole city in a blaze.” Dessewffy could not send academic essays to the Erdélyi Muzéum because the censors would have shortened them, even though, as he said, “censorship cannot be the law, as finding any thought guilty before publication is against the human spirit as well as any civil code. This is a way of judging thoughts we should dispose of, as it smothers the evolution and the power of the talent of thinking with the excuse that we should send away any future evil that may befall us.” Dessewffy attacked the institution of censorship with anthropological arguments that referred to both the law and the freedom of the human spirit. Limiting freedom did not mean limiting the freedom of individual expression but the evolution of justice. Taking too much medicine could be fatal (“too much of a good thing can be a bad thing”), but even poison could be harmless if you get used to taking it. The latter is, following Pliny the Elder, a reference to Mithridates of the second century BCE, who gradually self-administered poison so as to get used to it. In Dessewffy's interpretation, the King of Pontus “developed his immunity” by self-administering poisons and their antidotes. If censorship was abolished, humanity would have the chance to achieve the appropriate extent of moderation, or at least exposing the truth would have its conditions, as the truth is not readily available to us: “I view the truth as a hunter views a rabbit, he does not know where it is hiding, so he needs to look for it.”Footnote ¹³

This was not the first time Dessewffy employed the simile of the rabbit and the hunter when talking about censorship. More than a year-and-a-half earlier he had written to Kazinczy about French political events from the revolution to Napoleon's “tyranny” as follows: “The truth is like a rabbit: the hunter does not know where it is hiding, he needs to look for it but the tyrants are only like the hunter inasmuch as they shoot the rabbits once the dogs have disturbed them.”Footnote ¹⁴ Dessewffy did not say how the hunter in search of the rabbit differs from the tyrant (maybe he has no dogs or does not shoot the rabbit?). Be that as it may, he understood censorship as a tool of tyranny.

Dessewffy first attempted to publish his thoughts on freedom of the press in 1822. He asked András Thaisz (1789–1840), the editor of the Tudományos Gyűjtemény, to publish the text of one of his letters with the title Kevés szók, de figyelmet érdemlő tömött gondolatok egy igen nevezetes tárgyról, t. i. a lelkek bebörtönzéséről [A few words but ones worthy of attention concerning a fairly well-known subject, i.e., the imprisonment of minds]. Thaisz was naturally not at liberty to fulfill his request. We do not know whether he tried, but this ominous letter was retained.

This text had a better metaphorical structure and was more consistent than the those discussed above. Dessewffy emphasized the differences between body and mind: “In the physical realm only the body may obstruct and in the mental one the mind may do so. In the physical realm only matter may limit matter; in the mental realm, on the other hand, only the equilibrium of opposing mental powers provides barriers.”Footnote ¹⁵ Once again he stressed limit and equilibrium. He held that the operation of Rome's censors and the example of English freedom of the press both show that freedom of expression guarantees the acquisition of “all human and national rights,”Footnote ¹⁶ since in England, “everyone has the right to judge their fellow human's thoughts and feelings and to express and publish their judgment, but before publication it is just as wrong for someone with a mind to smother someone else's thoughts and feelings who has a different mind as it is to stop the movement of a hand under the pretense that the moving hand might reach, touch, grab or push away something illegally.”Footnote ¹⁷ This kind of freedom can be stripped from the mind as well as the body, but it is “less of an abuse to keep the body in chains than it is the mind.”Footnote ¹⁸ He also made legal and political arguments to bolster the differences between the body and the mind: to the need to separate the branches of power and to stressing the assumption of innocence he adds that “I do not know of any man who, unless he held tyranny close to his heart, would be a friend of censorship.”Footnote ¹⁹

Times were changing. Although the text could not be published due to its mention of censorship, he no longer had to fear the dark prison cells at this point. Dessewffy ended his brief article by referring to the Repraesentatio of Bars County and stating that he was only repeating the standpoint of the county. Bars County sent a note of protest to the King on 6 March 1820, in which it protested the Decretum Regium (royal order) of 11 January 1820 that prohibited the unlimited import of scientific and literary journals into the country.Footnote ²⁰ When Dessewffy referred to this famous grievance, he quoted an already public argument that demanded freedom of the press on behalf of constitutional rights. He referred to a paragraph in the old Hungarian code, Tripartitum (I:9. 4§), according to which not even the king could harm any person or their property outside the boundaries of the law. What we see here is an extension of this interpretation to the press, whereby personal freedom and freedom of ownership are connected to freedom of thought. It is important, however, to see that Dessewffy only used the legal argument for reference; he was probably more moved by the part of the note of that portrays censorship than that which limits enlightenment. He thought that the search for truth is not just an option but an obligation of humankind (and he went far beyond what he said in the above letters). The love of truth is an anthropological trait of humans that may not be obliterated: “There is greater foolishness even in religion than to take our fellow humans created in the likeness of God for fools and to take ourselves for angelic creatures compared to them. If you can do more, see more, or know more, let us know. Enlighten us if you are wiser than us. Why fear if you are right? Truth is the sweetest fruit of the soul and your secrecy makes your truth and your wisdom suspicious.”Footnote ²¹

Votum separatum

Following the diet of 1825/27, as a member of the public law subcommittee of the deputatio regnicolaris, Dessewffy put forward a number of opinions. The text he wrote as a comment to the bill on censorship drew the most attention.Footnote ²²

In his Votum separatum, Dessewffy once again argued for introducing the English model:

Dessewffy referred to the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment above, which envisioned the warranty of cultural development in the building and cherishing of the complicated system of relations of free individuals and groups, and which found the right community model in well-organized and well-functioning societies. The guarantee of success of this model was considered to be the taste and the totality of different judgments of taste arrived at by free conversation among free individuals.Footnote ²⁴ This model can work as long as the participants can contact each other without any kind of obstruction. “A citizen has the right to talk to another citizen” and “the right to examine and criticize someone else's ideas and the criticisms and examinations can be judged by any free person,” said Dessewffy.Footnote ²⁵ So ideas and views evolve on their own as the result of an ongoing conversation and critique, but the natural progress of their development cannot be affected either by limiting or forcing particular views: “evolution should be neither hurried nor delayed. However, what does this natural evolution have its most serious and permanent obstruction in if not censorship prior to printing?”Footnote ²⁶

Dessewffy suggested the abolition of censorship before printing and proposed a post-publication punishment system instead. Post-publication censorship would have been a kind of midway solution in his view:

All this is strongly connected to Dessewffy's conservative view of history; institutions adjust to ever-changing conditions spontaneously throughout history and any force or conscious influence on this natural process is damaging. Dessewffy thought that the progress of time could be measured against changing views. Freedom, habit, tradition, and the wisdom of our ancestors should be preserved and passed on. These are legacies we are obliged to attend to, but which may only be passed on via the freedom of conversation. From the rather lengthy legal arguments his comment on the law included, it is enough to point out that Desseweffy considered the law, like history, to be the carrier of collective wisdom. He felt that the introduction of censorship contradicted the tradition of hundreds of years of Hungarian lawmaking and the wisdom that had been polished for hundreds of years and embodied in Hungarian custom. His argument stated that there had been royal orders regulating the press since the sixteenth century but these contradicted certain articles in the law and that the paragraphs written on freedom of the press had overwritten these. He meant this in general, since the latter had been brought into existence in the spirit of the Hungarians’ ancient constitution, and in particular, since part of the censorship laws were not included in the code but only came into force by way of a royal order. Similar to many others, such as Edmund Burke, he viewed the law as a collection of forms that crystallized throughout history. This made it bound to a time and a place. At the same time, Dessewffy accepted the Universalist theorem according to which, as another of his favorite authors, Montesquieu, put it, “laws are … the necessary relations which derive from the nature of things.”Footnote ²⁸ This may be why Dessewffy saw no contradiction to the Hungarian constitution and legal tradition when, with regard to press laws, he suggested introducing the British (i.e., jury) model not just in “the spirit of the law” but in practice as well.

The Light and Glory of Albion: Pamphlets about Freedom of the Press

The majority of critical texts discussed the legitimacy of the British model. The anonymous author of the pamphlet entitled Sajtószabadság [Liberty of the press] viewed freedom of the press as the natural right of humans, as did Dessewffy, so that “whatever beauty we have in the world was and is borne by the golden life of society.”Footnote ²⁹ He advocated the ancient constitution, which was considered perfect, but—and he drew a radically different conclusion in this respect—which could only be preserved with the help of censorship. As he called on the “glorious Hungarian land,” “your ancient civil constitution is more perfect than to need foreign, restless and insufferable and unpeaceful peoples’ appendices.”Footnote ³⁰ He recommended avoiding foreign habits that were most easily spread in books. This meant that the institution of censorship guaranteed “nicer liberties for the Hungarian than he could give himself and pass down to his descendants.”Footnote ³¹ Freedom then was not unlimited: “we are encircled by unlimited freedom of the press and it attacks the freedom of the Hungarian nation.”Footnote ³² The anonymous author of the pamphlet quoted Friedrich Gentz, who translated Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France into German, and who demonstrated how freedom of the press could be taken advantage of.Footnote ³³ Gentz asserted that political freedom was therefore natural freedom, once you deduced from it that part without which a state cannot exist.Footnote ³⁴ The author agreed that this kind of limitation of freedom was necessary, otherwise the excessive freedom of thinking, writing, and reading would result in the spreading of the kind of lewdness, corruption, and immorality that was present in London. (Here he quoted Abraham Lemoine, the opponent of Viscount Bolingbroke, a theologian, although he did not mention the fact that Lemoine had been dead for seventy-four years and so his evaluation was a portrayal of the debauchery that had prevailed a hundred years earlier.Footnote ³⁵ )

Pál Kis's pamphlet, A “Sajtó” Szabadsága [The liberty of the press], was a liberal translation of Gentz's treatise, Pressfreiheit in England, to which it made no made reference, and which was completed by conclusions drawn in the German author's other writings.Footnote ³⁶ The text is incredibly hard to follow and the particular example it describes and the press debate that was sparked by the Junius letters is impossible to understand without a familiarity with the Gentz text. On the one hand, Kis analyzed the deficiencies of the British post-publication punishment system. On the other hand, he referred to the connections between the spreading of filthy, stubborn, and Godless things in book form and the French Revolution (namely the key figures of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and even Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon).Footnote ³⁷ The advocates of freedom of the press and the revolutionaries did the same thing, that is attack the constitution. Kis agreed that freedom of the press is not a constitutional liberty and it actually endangers it due to the fact that liberties can be taken advantage of. He was of the opinion that “just as the English constitution was not brought into existence by the press, its current existence is also not due to it.”Footnote ³⁸ Therefore, it was gravely misleading to refer to the constitution and freedom of the press in the same breath. “Great is the light and glory of Albion—but how great is its happiness?” Kis asked. His response was that freedom of the press and the distribution of books would necessarily bring this light and glory down and lead to the fall.Footnote ³⁹

József Ponori Thewrewk attacked Dessweffy's opinion in his Hazafiúi elmélkedések [Patriotic meditations] along the lines of a conservative Prussian statesman named Jean Pierre Frédéric Ancillon, who was a relative of Gentz and a follower of Burke and Montesquieu. He brought the critique of luxury and fashion to the fore, and he revived those “classic” critiques of the Enlightenment that contested both the communication habits of the new age and the new institutions. In his text, which is full of metaphors, Ponori Thewrewk judged those who try to change things over which they have no jurisdiction: “This political illness gets the better of the passionate and weak-minded patrons not just for the day or the night, but often for a whole lifetime. This is how some bootmaker who used to be able to maintain himself and his family properly, once beginning to sit around cafés and greedily consuming untruthful newspapers, becomes quite the politician bootmaker and wants to sew a new constitution constantly out of leather, not parchment, and this useless labor turns him and his family into beggars.”Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, Ponori Thewrewk attributed an effect to reading books, which in Hungary provided a religious rebuttal against the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other French philosophers. One example is of the peasant who was handed a book and so abandoned his work:

Ponori Thewrewk's lengthy discussion is a goldmine of arguments against freedom of the press: It includes an analysis of common law and constitutional law as well as historical explanations (about, among other things, how misleading the analogy between post-publication censors and Roman ones was). Finally, the critique of his own age became the glue that held these diverse arguments together. This is a late instance of a critique of the Enlightenment that considered the decadence of the new age to be rooted in the free and liberal reading of books.Footnote ⁴² Clearly, the issue of censorship is of key importance in this critique. Two anonymous authors explained that philosophers “drive humanity into decadence by their pretended humane and tender sensitivities” and freedom of the press presents extraordinary dangers, as “the freedom of expression is a right which enables lies to be held true and vice to be held virtuous by discarding the leadership of common sense and living solely for the body and wallowing in the disgust of luscious pleasures,” in one of the sections of the Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) journal Ephemerides statisticae, politicae, oeconomicae, litterariae.Footnote ⁴³

Against Servitude: Interpretation of the Counties

Dessewffy's British model, which would have adopted practical solutions, was attacked from numerous sources in the pamphlets. Some critics had a different interpretation of the liberties set forth in the constitution, others had a different view on the political situation in England, and still others saw the effects of books on thinking and history differently. What was common to all these contradictory arguments was, unsurprisingly in Hungary, their reference to the ancient constitution. It would be an oversimplification of Dessewffy's train of thought, however, to say that it showcased a conservative political language (à la Burke) that was mixed with other models of the social contract, since just as we saw in the three pamphlets, this political language could only make its way to him through the filters of the German Enlightenment and the critiques thereof.

Dessewffy connected the issue of political freedom to man's desire for happiness and perfection and the concept of enlightened Bildung. “In the matters of men,” he wrote, “although nothing provides overall happiness, nothing ever has been or will be perfect, our desire for perfection is God-given.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He recognized (in the spirit of Gentz, using almost the exact same words) that “there can be no state without a sacrifice of natural freedom.”Footnote ⁴⁵ At the same time, perfection and the related “welcome education and teaching preclude vice,” the natural freedom of the individual, come before political liberties. In his use of the concept, through education the individual acquires “commitments which belong under the perfect internal law,” without which “both natural and social freedom” can be annihilated.Footnote ⁴⁶ The individual natural right of freedom appears as the freedom to criticize, and this is completed by the freedom of national politics.

Clearly, to the emphasis on this last point made Votum separatum widely popular among the counties, as the issue of freedom of the press had become a part of the politics of gravamen since the Repraesentatio of Bars County. Counties frequently quoted from one of the speeches of the Irishman (he was called English in Hungary) Richard Brinsley Sheridan: “The press should be unfettered, that its freedom should be, as indeed it was, commensurate with the freedom of the people and the well-being of a virtuous State.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Zala County, for one, declared that it would support Dessewffy's opinion and if his proposal failed, censorship should be placed under the competence of the diet.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nyitra County found freedom of the press useful against the accusations made against Hungary.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tolna County would have been happy with the freedom to print municipal and county documents.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Dessewffy, however, these aims were pushed into the background. Of the known county views, only that of Nógrád came close to the count's original proposal and although it stayed silent on the question of introducing juries, it treated freedom of the press as a promotional tool for civil moderation that would also promote the nation's happiness.Footnote ⁵¹

This was not only about the fact that the English model and its critique could only make their way to Hungary indirectly, but also about the fact that the political life of the debate received a special Hungarian interpretation, according to which the promotion of political liberties was placed within the context of traditional politics of grievances. These discourses naturally were not sharply divided. The political grievances of the estates were primarily targeted at works that criticized the Hungarian constitution and they (e.g., Nyitra County) noted that censorship obstructed the publication of an appropriate response.Footnote ⁵² Different points were stressed, however. Actually, this discourse allowed for no tension between the different concepts of freedom, understood as the individual's natural freedom, the freedom to criticize, or as the opposite of slavery.

One example that showcases the complexity of the debate is Lajos Kossuth's (1802–94) report of the diet. A session was called due to a grievance of Abaúj County, as a journal from Kassa (now Košice, Slovakia) was only allowed to be published if it avoided political writings. Krassó, Torontál, and Szatmár counties joined in, as the first could not print the notes it had written in sympathy with the Polish nation, the second could not have its comments on the regular works published, and the third tried to publish a report of the diet's deputies. Ödön Beöthy (1796–1854), representative of Bihar County, referred to the committee's works at a district meeting that was also concerned with the issue of freedom of the press and he quoted Dessewffy's writing as if its points represented generally accepted views. Besides constitutional and natural arguments, the arising debate gave place to concrete grievances. László Palóczy's (1783–1861) anthropological argument is the only one that could be related to Dessewffy's opinion piece, although the fact of the matter is that Palóczy attributed the quotation of Sheridan, cited above, to “famous Burke” in his comment, which also made reference to Joseph von Sonnenfels's philosophy of the state and Immanuel Kant's concept of the Enlightenment.Footnote ⁵³

Toward a Pragmatic Political Language: The Interpretation of Count Aurél Dessewffy

Considering the preceding discussion, it is interesting to note the grounds on which Dessewffy's son, Aurél, rejected his father's strategy a few years later. The manuscript, entitled La liberté de la presse, written in formal French, documented the discourse between father and son. Dessewffy senior opened the debate as early as January 1838, in which he symbolically passed the political torch to his son: “I am like an old fox who endured many hunts and whose fur has been scratched by many a bullet without leaving an open or deadly wound. May the younger foxes do as well as I did and then they can be saved. I, the old fox who cannot run as fast and well as I used to, shall retire into my cave and feed myself fresh grass instead of bleeding chickens.”Footnote ⁵⁴ We also know of a letter József Dessewffy wrote to his son in 1839, in which he argues with a letter his son wrote on the question of freedom of the press. Certain overlaps imply that József Dessewffy replied to a text that has the same examples as one published after Aurél's death, which originally may have been much longer.Footnote ⁵⁵ His son's French text must have been written around that time.

Aurél Dessewffy, who had already entered the national political scene as a member of the House of Lords, was a well-known conservative politician and the leader of the young conservative party of the early 1840s. As Iván Zoltán Dénes notes “it is not accidental that his liberal contemporaries labeled him ‘the Hungarian Gentz.’”Footnote ⁵⁶ He refused to treat the issue of freedom of the press as a theoretical one: “so the question is,” he said, “one which concerns political employability, in which sense there may be no necessary truths.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He rejected the argument that freedom of the press cannot be harmful, as the truth will eventually triumph, saying that “in reality human passions and interests, especially those of the masses play a much greater role than cold reason does,” meaning it is not the exaggerations of the intellect we should fear but passions and emotions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Freedom of the press was a means of limitation for him as well, but not as a control of extremes and a provider of moderation but as one that bars growth. France developed most quickly (during the reigns of Louis XIV and Napoleon) when her state was “the extreme opposite of freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As for Hungary, he said, it was composed of “millions of Slavic peasants to whom it can be proven on a couple of pieces of printed paper that it was thieves who came from Asia nine centuries ago and took their land and only left them some parts for compulsory cultivation and taxes.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He found this Pan-Slavic historical narrative mistaken and dangerous, that peasants might rise against their Hungarian lords if they read such things. On the one hand, his argument broke with from his father's conservative argumentation when he stated that “political freedom is not an end but a means” and called the promotion of freedom above all “the noble mistake of the human spirit.”Footnote ⁶¹ On the other hand, he followed the argument of Sonnenfels that regarded censorship as an institution of education and would have regulated who could access what book.Footnote ⁶² Finally, he attacked his father's philosophical-anthropological standpoint, which placed the practicality of evaluating the political situation above József Dessewffy's concept of political freedom. This way he positioned the opposites of illusion and reality in place of the dichotomy of truth and falsity. In Aurél Dessewffy's view, the political situation and the character of the constitution and the residents could be so different that “the repressive system [i.e., one which builds on post-publication punishment] which is the best in some country under certain circumstances may be the worst system under others.”Footnote ⁶³

In his response, József Dessewffy, pointed out the diversity and changeable nature of circumstances: “the greatest mistake of the present day is that it cannot set the right limit considering the circumstances.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Time appears differently here than for Aurél Dessewffy, where it is set to the timeless principle of setting the limit. On the one hand, he remarked: “the law of nature is the one we cannot change, so the relative tipping of the cups on the scale brings forth equilibrium or a near-balance state or at least that which will lead to this balance.”Footnote ⁶⁵ On the other hand, József Dessewffy emphasized the importance of lived, subjective time, and pointed to the wisdom of experiences collected through this time. Finally, he attributed special importance to the crediting force of historical examples. József Dessewffy returned to the issue a number of times, for example, when he described the traits of a real statesman: “A real statesman should never view eras and phases (époques et periodes) in separation as it were instead of a series of interconnected events.”Footnote ⁶⁶ As in his earlier writings, his argument runs into anthropological considerations: “Lawmaking should never extend to the most infrequent vice [meaning the distribution of perverse pictures, in particular]. It suffices to cut down the more frequent ones by simultaneously allowing for human freedom and therefore the occurrence of virtue and the evolution of the intellect's talents. It is part of human nature to evolve and perfect ourselves both intellectually and morally by good and bad models or even through failing and vice.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The interconnected values of freedom and virtue evolve together along certain checks and balances, between good and bad, and this evolution is hindered by historical events and examples. The accessibility of freedom and virtue is the warranty of progress and culture and so censorship is not a means but an artificial hindrance to a natural process.

The father went through the historical examples his son listed, from the evaluation of England's political situation through Louis Bonaparte's attempted coup in Strasbourg, all the way to analyzing the Hungarian Diet's debates. The system of arguments outlined through these examples showed significant digressions from his son's arguments. Aurél Dessewffy spoke a different, albeit also somewhat conservative, political language. It may suffice to pick one example from József Dessewffy: “You fear that our Slovak people will revolt if someone writes that the Scythians, Huns, and Magyars defeated and fettered the old Slovaks. Even if some Slovaks read, I still would not fear such talk delivered in books, since it is easy to show that no Slovak can prove that his forefather was fettered by the forefather of his lord and that his forefather either bought the cattle or was given it with a royal note, so either the Slovak peasant has to work for the land or has to buy himself off.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The father thought that this point, the truth of the historical examples, could not be criticized by political practice. Time progresses but history preserves truths that not only promote but guarantee human development.Footnote ⁶⁹