In his great 1848 historical drama, Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:

True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it can not be said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.

With respect to the first of these, briefly, it is now generally acknowledged that while the various lands of the House of Habsburg were still, in R. J. W. Evans's felicitous phrase, “a complex and subtly balanced organism, not a state but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements,”Footnote ¹ yet at the same time by the early eighteenth century, these lands did constitute a powerful “political geographic center” that defined it as one of the great powers of Europe.Footnote ² The traditional medieval and early modern fixation with dynastic prestige now hinged on the monarchy's Great Power identity and status within the emerging European state system.Footnote ³ But in the mid-1730s the monarchy entered a period of political, military, and financial crisis. In the decade and a half that followed, one crisis flowed into the other with increasing severity. Beginning with the unfortunate War of the Polish Succession (1733–38), leading directly into the humiliating Turkish war of 1737–39, and culminating in the disastrous War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), not only the Great Power status but also the very existence of the monarchy was threatened. These wars and defeats laid bare the inadequacies of the society at every level, shaking confidence not only in the structures, but also the underlying assumptions. Beyond the humiliation of territorial losses, the wars accentuated the inadequacy of the monarchy's military establishment and its fiscal weakness, highlighted by the inability to finance the conflicts effectively. In the War of the Austrian Succession, its credit was so weak that only around 25 million gulden of the war's total cost of 145 million could be covered by loans. While English and Dutch subsidies accounted for another 30 million, the remaining 90 million had to be covered by increased taxation.Footnote ⁴ The first great wave of reforms undertaken under Maria Theresa, and generally associated with the name of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz, were essentially a response to this crisis. To support an adequate military establishment in peacetime to meet the defense requirements, two major changes were deemed necessary. In the first instance, to ensure the modernization of the military establishment, the “burden” of recruitment, training, and equipping of the army was taken over by the crown from the provincial estates. The military reforms that ensued had the effect of modernizing the Habsburg army, but even more significantly set in motion the “evolution of a unitary means of defence … that paid no heed to any separate claims” of the constituent lands of the monarchy, which thus grew to enhance the notion of a single unitary state (Gesamtstaat) and made the army a significant integrating factor within it.Footnote ⁵ To finance this new standing army, the second major change included the revolutionary principle posited by Haugwitz of regular taxation of seigneurial demesnes in peacetime, which he insisted “God-pleasing justice and natural equity” demanded.Footnote ⁶ These revenues (Contributionale) were administered by an entirely new, crown-directed administrative structure, which included a Central Directory uniting all political and financial administration (Directorium in publicis et cameralibus), and an intendancy for each of the provinces (Länderdeputation, later called Representation und Kammer) overlooking an extensive system of crown-appointed district offices (Kreisamt).Footnote ⁷

The second broader dynamic that subsequently made itself felt was earlier anticipated by the conservative Court Chamberlain, Count Johann Joseph Khevenhüller, who had already expressed his concern with the Haugwitz reforms that “once the spirit of novelty begins to rule it will not be easy to halt,” and this certainly proved to be the case as the years wore on.Footnote ⁸ As Grete Klingenstein pointed out in a seminal essay more than thirty years ago, both an acceleration and expansion of the reform dynamic soon made themselves felt. The reform dynamic quickly gained an impetus that was difficult to arrest. Ever more social, economic, political, and cultural problems came under its purview, until reform for its own sake and for the sake of uniformity became an adequate warrant for change. Social and economic problems frequently identified by low-level officials, academics, estate stewards, and even the military resulted in extensive deliberations at the center, which in turn led to a flood of new legislation. But as the crown moved to address a specific problem, other problems would often be highlighted. Thus, Habsburg reform proceeded not only much more rapidly, but also set forces into motion whose interaction constantly tended to expand the areas of human activity it saw in need of reform. By the 1780s, the Habsburg monarchy had become the locus of the boldest and most ambitious innovations in Europe.Footnote ⁹

It is within the context of these broader developments that I want to examine some of the conflicting notions that lay behind the specific reform policies adopted. I have used the terms “cameralism,” “Josephinism,” and “Enlightenment” as the organizing framework, and have put them in that order in the title because in a sense that is how they make their chronological appearance in the Habsburg monarchy. While the term “Enlightenment” will be the most familiar, matters have become considerably more complicated over the past generation as a result of an increasing tendency among scholars to see the European Enlightenment as a broad spectrum of regional and ideological variants that includes the concept of a “religious Enlightenment.”Footnote ¹⁰ When we speak of an “Enlightenment party” in the Austrian context, however, we generally refer to devotees of the mature Western—and especially French—secular Enlightenment. “Cameralism” may be a term less familiar than “Enlightenment” but has become a staple of early modern historians, particularly after the seminal work of Marc Raeff and the rejoinder by Andre Wakefield.Footnote ¹¹ Conceived as a “science” of administration by a number of seventeenth-century political economists, it generally addressed practical problems of state building and posited policy recommendations to improve resource management and the productivity and moral well-being of society. “Josephinism,” however, is a term very specific to the Habsburg monarchy, the meaning and origins of which had long been the objects of one of the most savage controversies in Central European historiography.

The term “Josephinism” was initially coined in the nineteenth century to describe the reform program implemented in the Habsburg monarchy during the reign of Emperor Joseph II (1780–90), but came increasingly to apply specifically to the measures undertaken against the social, economic, political, and cultural position of the Catholic Church in the monarchy.Footnote ¹² The main outlines of the discussion were first charted more than seventy years ago in discussions stimulated by the Nazi-tainted cultural historian, Fritz Valjavec, and Eduard Winter (whose colorful career saw him evolve from seminarian, through Nazi to Marxist), which subsequently prompted the famous response by the Jesuit scholar, Ferdinand Maass, and led to a large and fruitful literature.Footnote ¹³ From the start, definitions have ranged across a broad spectrum of which those of Valjavec and Maass could be seen as the opposite poles. Valjavec tended to see Josephinism as a general ideology of reform with a broad political and ideological agenda, and it was no coincidence that the title of an earlier version of his slender volume on Josephinism was entitled “Josephinism as a political and ideological movement.”Footnote ¹⁴ This rather vague notion was shared by such authors as the American Paul Bernard, who saw it as a rather “diffuse” ideology consisting of many different viewpoints.Footnote ¹⁵ Recently, Joseph II's principal biographer has similarly suggested that Josephinism was merely “the Austrian monarchy's version of the Enlightenment.”Footnote ¹⁶ The problem with such an approach, as the Austrian historian Erich Zöllner has noted, is that it tends to undermine the central nature of the church-state question in the controversy.Footnote ¹⁷ Maass, however, famously interpreted it narrowly as state control over the ecclesiastical sphere, that is, Austrian Erastianism or Staatskirchentum. Although in his major work he initially saw the Habsburg State Chancellor, Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, whom he characterized as a “ruthless” Western Enlightenment secularist, as the moving force behind the movement,Footnote ¹⁸ he subsequently amended his position in a smaller volume that now argued that “Maria Theresia was not only the mother of Joseph II but also of Josephinism.”Footnote ¹⁹ While Maass tended, initially at least, to see Josephinism as he understood it as an artificially introduced notion alien to Austrian religious traditions, his great opponent, Winter, stressed that it was merely the culmination of a homegrown Reform Catholic momentum in Central Europe.Footnote ²⁰ Modern interpretations have come to agree with Winter on this last point, and most interpretations have therefore located the roots of the reform momentum in the early eighteenth century, and see the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1740–80) as the critical era during which the reform ideas crystallized.

It is, of course, not surprising that for most contemporaries the confessional dimension seemed to be the dominant theme of the reform dynamic. Because Counter-Reformation Catholicism with its Baroque façade was in many ways the integrating ideology of the highly pluralistic patrimony of the Habsburgs in the seventeenth century, it involved not only a set of confessional dogmas, but also broader patterns of thought and culture inextricably intertwined with a social and political infrastructure that had grown out of the economic and social upheavals of the era.Footnote ²¹ When this polity proved unequal to the challenges it faced in the first half of the eighteenth century, the remedial measures undertaken identified confessional issues among the central problems to be addressed. Because of the degree of integration between political and confessional issues in the Counter-Reformation state, however, these reforms were not effected in discrete confessional spheres but had broad social, economic, and political consequences. Secular, rational, and utilitarian values and a simpler, internalized religious ethos thus came to constitute the backbone of Josephinism.Footnote ²²

However, we do well to keep in mind, as Robert Evans has pointed out, that the critique of the Baroque Counter-Reformation polity “assumed the character of a congeries of manifold particular confrontations” with it.Footnote ²³ The argument I am making is that by disentangling the separate strains of this reform dynamic we can develop a more nuanced understanding of it and are consequently in a better position to understand the nature of the debates within governing circles on policies to be adopted. Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment are integral parts of the kaleidoscopic whole that made up the Habsburg reform program of the eighteenth century, but we must make distinctions between the three. Though they have much in common, it is where they differ that goes to the heart of the reform dynamic of enlightened absolutism in the Habsburg monarchy. I have made some aspects of this argument in the past,Footnote ²⁴ but my purpose here is to bring them together in sharper focus.

As a starting point I would like to underscore a point well made by Charles Ingrao that while the Enlightenment had much in common with the cameralist tradition, the distinctions between the two have to be clearly recognized.Footnote ²⁵ To sort out some of these differences in the Habsburg case, we might begin by reminding ourselves that as political economists the cameralists shared the mercantilists’ premises of limited wealth and national self-sufficiency—in fact, John Gagliardo has defined cameralism simply as “the German brand of mercantilism.”Footnote ²⁶ In this context it is important to emphasize that much of the social and political reform program advocated by them had a primarily fiscal focus. Indeed, the very name cameralism—derived from Camera, the then-common Austrian expression for Treasury or Exchequer—betrayed the overwhelming concern with public revenue.Footnote ²⁷ This aspect has received broad new attention in recent historiography, as John Brewer's notion of a “fiscal military state,” originally coined for the British case, has increasingly been given Europe-wide relevance.Footnote ²⁸ This was also Haugwitz's primary concern, and his intellectual debt to the cameralists, particularly to Wilhelm von Schröder, has long been acknowledged.Footnote ²⁹ Haugwitz's strong interest in the economics of cameralism is equally evident from his invitation of one of the most prominent German cameralists, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, to come to Vienna to introduce courses in economics and public finance at the recently founded civil service training academy, the Theresianum. Footnote ³⁰ The degree to which Haugwitz's fiscal focus proceeded from traditional mercantilist premises, as indeed did those of many of the officials in his ministry, as well as that of Count Rudolph Chotek, Head of the Treasury (Hofkammer) and Chair of the semiofficial Vienna City Bank, should also be stressed. This becomes particularly evident in the heated debates conducted over the financing of the Seven Years’ War, where the overwhelming obsession with revenue flow led to an astonishing avalanche of extraordinary taxes.Footnote ³¹ The critique of these taxes best articulated by State Chancellor Kaunitz heralded a new perspective, which was to gain momentum in the postwar years: “It does not require much reflection or any profound insight to invent all kinds of ways and means of squeezing money out of our subjects. He who wishes to do so in a manner both reasonable and beneficial to the monarch and the state, however, must first … devote an equal measure of zeal to increasing the subjects’ wealth so that they might bear this additional burden.”Footnote ³² As Grete Klingenstein has pointed out, Kaunitz was, in fact, “the main pivot for the transfer of the new currents of economic thought that swayed Western Europe after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).”Footnote ³³

Indeed, the Diplomatic Revolution and the Seven Years’ War not only led to a more extensive exchange of diplomats, bureaucrats, and military officials between Austria and France, but also strengthened and broadened cultural contacts. Such contacts can be glimpsed from the memoirs of the famous Paris engraver, Jean-Georges Wille,Footnote ³⁴ and even more explicit references to clear-cut channels of literary transmission can be found in the correspondence between Kaunitz's friend, Giacomo Durazzo, and the Parisian poet and dramatist, Charles Simon Favart. The latter not only forwarded theatrical materials to Vienna, but also acted as Durazzo's “literary agent” keeping him advised of all Parisian publications and filling book orders where requested.Footnote ³⁵ From the diary of the young Count Karl Zinzendorf, who arrived in Vienna in 1761, we get a clear picture of just how au courant Viennese high society rapidly became with an amazingly broad spectrum of Western (and especially French) books. Voltaire and the Encyclopedie were apparently common currency with both men and women at social gatherings,Footnote ³⁶ and new books appeared to be passed from hand to hand, and avidly devoured by each in turn.Footnote ³⁷ From the sheer range of titles, from politics and philosophy, through science to erotica, it would appear that whatever censorship restrictions might have existed for the broader public, there seemed to be virtually no restrictions on the reading of the elites.Footnote ³⁸ As Ludwig Zinzendorf advised his brother Karl, customs officials searched the bags but not the pockets of nobles. Casual mention of friends and relatives in high places would also guarantee “a more gentle treatment” when importing forbidden books.Footnote ³⁹

Kaunitz and his protégées, who quite explicitly thought of themselves as Aufklärer (Enlighteners), increasingly looked into the direction of the antimercantilist critique being developed by such luminaries of the Western Enlightenment as David Hume, François Quesnay, Jean-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay, and Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours.Footnote ⁴⁰ In years following the Seven Years’ War, they outlined an ambitious, protoliberal social and economic reform program that included suggestions for sweeping agrarian changes. Frequently but not invariably inspired by such thinkers, the group advocated a broader economic perspective, with more liberal economic, social, and political notions, culminating in a series of reform proposals in 1767. Significantly, the young Joseph II was not among them. One of its staunchest proponents, the President of the Court of Audit, Count Ludwig Zinzendorf, spoke of a “sort of party” headed by State Chancellor Kaunitz. “We are trying very hard to enlighten this prince [Joseph II],” he noted, and expressed the hope “that he will do justice to the zeal, and perhaps even to the enlightenment of several individuals of whom he has had a different opinion.”Footnote ⁴¹ Joseph remained unmoved and was instrumental in derailing the planned reforms.Footnote ⁴² In the following years he continued to advocate a policy of strict autarky with an almost brutal indifference to its consequences.Footnote ⁴³ He was prepared to implement his policy “even if 2 or 3 million people thereby had cause to complain … and 100 industrialists in Vienna will be ruined.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Or, as he put it to Zinzendorf's half-brother, Karl, in 1788: “From my own long experience I am completely convinced that existing prohibitive tariffs are in the interest of the state, and no arguments … will ever change my mind, so that you can in future entirely spare yourself your obstinate efforts to introduce … free trade.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In contrast to many of his more Enlightenment-oriented ministers, the mercantilist ideal of self-sufficiency thus remained the centerpiece of Joseph's economic beliefs.

A similar case can be made about the concentration of central powers that characterized the new superministry, the Directorium in publicis et cameralibus, introduced by the Haugwitz reforms. As the names publicis and cameralibus suggest, it united both political-administrative and financial competences in a single instance. Here, too, the debt to Schröder's argument for absolutism and centralism as well as the hostility to the Church and feudal lords was quite clear-cut. In Haugwitz's view this particularly Hobbesian brand of cameralist injunctions found practical confirmation in the administrative system of Prussia, as he understood it, where the maximum concentration of central power apparently afforded by the Prussian Directory seemed to guarantee the efficiency that the Habsburg administration lacked. In the years following the establishment of the Directory, the pace of concentration accelerated. In 1751 a whole series of competences touching on the revenue-collecting process—that is, the entire panoply of semijudicial matters that involved economic issues, the so-called materiae mixtae: adjudication of entailed estates, interpretation of guild privileges, birthrights, hunting rights, and the like—were removed from the Supreme Judiciary and incorporated into the Directory. In 1753, the only recently created Central Directory for Commerce (Universalcommerzdirectorium) became a subordinate department of the Directory. By 1755, the Directory had taken over so many of the duties of the Treasury (Hofkammer) that Haugwitz was able to suggest the latter be abolished altogether. The Ministry of Mines and Minerals (Münz- und Bergkolleg), the Commissariat for Military Supply (Generalkriegskommissariat), and the Department of Invalid Veterans (Invalidenhofkommission) all followed suit in 1757. Further, as the need for new administrative functions was perceived, each almost automatically found concrete expression as new subsidiary departments of the Directory. This was the case with both the Police Commission (Polizeihofkommission) formed in 1749 and the Commission in Charge of Poor Relief (Stiftungshofkommission) formed in 1751. In short, except for the Ministries of War, Justice, and Foreign Affairs, Haugwitz's Directory ran virtually all other governmental business in Austria and Bohemia.Footnote ⁴⁶

During the Seven Years’ War, it became evident that such an accretion of functions quickly began to burden down the Directory. It became mired in petty detail and judicial wrangles until finally its efficiency was increasingly impaired. Thus, ironically, the administrative reforms motivated by an anxiety to safeguard the fiscal performance of the Directory began to impede that very performance. This led to the second wave of administrative reforms in 1760–61, again largely inspired by Kaunitz, which undid the concentration of power in a single central Directory in favor of several autonomous ministries. Even more importantly, it created an impartial domestic advisory body known as the Council of State (Staatsrat) whose function it was to “enlighten” the monarch on policy options in light of the conflicting interests of the various ministries. While one could not call this a separation of powers in the sense conceived by Montesquieu, yet the separation of ministerial competences represented a fundamental shift in government policies away from narrow fiscal measures to broader social and economic development and from autocratic impulses to a more consultative form of government. Kaunitz and his political allies recognized that government was not a seamless monolith but a series of difficult choices among numerous mutually exclusive options. The task of autonomous ministries was to develop and recommend policy based on the inherent logic of each ministry, but the difficult choices “between Rome and Carthage” were left to the executive authority. But here, too, was the internal mitigation of the Council of State. In the best Enlightenment tradition, the dialectics of its debates were to disentangle the “rationality” of the difficult choices facing the monarch, and where a monarch such as Joseph II ignored such advice it was regarded as an act of willful despotism.Footnote ⁴⁷

Though Joseph as crown prince initially supported this reform, he soon had a change of heart and showed an increasing preference for the Haugwitzian model. By 1765 he was already writing, “My pride was thoroughly punished for having agreed so quickly in this case, and I see that I understood something in five minutes which, upon reflection, I can no longer imagine.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Thereafter he consistently attempted to undo the fundamental premise of the reform of 1760–61 in favor of unchecked centralization, whether it was through control, transformation, or abolition of the Council of State, through the reintroduction of a Directorium or some other ministerial plenum under his supervision, or, finally, through the introduction of an outright dictatorship to be entrusted to him—or to use Joseph's words—a system that would “give to one man alone blind trust, and to allow him to proceed in an almost despotic manner.”Footnote ⁴⁹ However, when during the great ministerial shuffle of 1771, it became clear that Maria Theresa was prepared to put both the administrative and financial portfolios into the hands of one minister, and that the minister was to be Count Friedrich von Hatzfeld, Joseph made an abrupt turn in favor of the status quo and had Hatzfeld moved to the Council of State where he had no ministerial responsibility.Footnote ⁵⁰ Clearly, the only man to whom “blind trust” was to be given “to proceed in an almost despotic manner” was the emperor, which, as long as his mother was alive, was not an option. But then, shortly after becoming sole ruler in 1780 he reunited the political-administrative and financial competences into a single ministry along the lines of Haugwitz's Directorium, which to him was a precondition of the sort of reform program he envisioned.Footnote ⁵¹ As his principal biographer has pointed out, Joseph had no intention of abandoning any aspect of his absolute power, and though he may not have been despotic in the sense of “gross abuse of power,” he was indeed despotic in the sense of transgressing established constitutions and often failing to listen to sound advice.Footnote ⁵²

This brings us to my third comparative focus and in some senses to the crux of the debate on enlightened absolutism. Cameralists had been aware that at the heart of the economic problems of the Habsburg monarchy lay archaic social values, which were an impediment to the success of the reforms they envisioned. But what was archaic about it in their eyes was not the value system that underpinned the stratification of the social hierarchy but rather premodern behavior patterns, particularly among the lower classes. A number of modern historians have thus argued that early modern elites sought to rationalize social structures by the imposition of a “social discipline” on inchoate traditionalist populations, with the intent of increasing both control and productivity.Footnote ⁵³ However, it is important to keep in mind that, by and large, cameralists were a conservative lot in questions of social policy, and their prescriptions tended to be overlaid with a heavy cloak of paternalism.Footnote ⁵⁴ If the long-range agenda of this effort was, in the words of Marc Raeff, an endeavor “to foster and give full scope to the creative energies of the individual members of society by means of the state's direction,” the key to its success was the internalization of the new rigorous social norms and rules of behavior and the loosening of at least some of the constraints of the traditional social order.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet the more successful this was and the more that tightly controlled subjects were metamorphosed into dynamic autonomous citizens, the more it rendered the very existence of the regulatory state problematic. The impact of the reform era, and particularly the Josephinian decade, was far-reaching for the Habsburg monarchy. The concepts of an abstract state and citizenship were enhanced by the many social changes that were brought about, and among the most lasting consequences of these reforms was the emergence of a politically conscious public opinion, which increasingly called into question the absolute authority of the monarch.Footnote ⁵⁶ The spread of the Masonic Order, which reached its high point of popularity and influence in the monarchy during this period, and which explicitly erased class distinctions among its members, was symptomatic of that tendency.Footnote ⁵⁷ This was certainly not a development that Joseph sought to encourage. His avowed sentiment that bureaucrats were not paid to think, merely to obey,Footnote ⁵⁸ and his repeatedly stressed ideal of exact compliance with orders, unquestioning obedience, and untrammeled execution of commands may well have deserved the rebuke of State Chancellor Kaunitz that it was “better to reign over free and thinking beings than to rule over base slaves,” but did little to change his tone.Footnote ⁵⁹ Certainly the conflicts during the 1780s with his education minister, Gottfried van Swieten, so well documented by Wangermann, show well the difference between an agenda of social control and one of emancipation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Joseph's backtracking in the later part of his reign—marked by restrictions on the activities of the Freemasons, limitations on his earlier liberal censorship policies, and the emergence of a secret police—demonstrates that for all the radicalism of many of his reforms, he retained the socially conservative paternalism of the cameralists to the end.Footnote ⁶¹

Similar differences of perspective can also be seen within Josephinism. As already noted in the preceding text, central to the reform momentum within the Habsburg monarchy remained the attack on the political and social position of the Catholic Church. But as Eduard Winter long ago demonstrated this was a movement within the Church—a general reaction against ostentatious Baroque display and piety, coupled with a retreat from some of the theological positions and pastoral practices of the Counter-Reformation. Sometimes called “Reform Catholicism” or the “Catholic Enlightenment,” it took many different forms on the European continent. The pragmatic reform Catholicism inspired by the famous Modenese provost, Lodovico Antonio Muratori, for example, was widely appreciated in the Habsburg monarchy and many other inspirations have been adduced.Footnote ⁶² But the most famous and influential Catholic reform stimulus came from Jansenism, which originated in mid-seventeenth-century France and represented a reaffirmation of the stern Augustinian tradition in the face of the flexible sensuality of the Baroque. Officially condemned by the papal bull Unigenitus, the movement not only survived, but with some slight modifications grew into the strongest reform impulse within eighteenth-century Catholicism.Footnote ⁶³ Beginning in 1680, when Count Franz Anton von Sporck was converted to Jansenism on his cavalier tour in the Low Countries and began a concerted campaign to spread these ideas when he returned to Austria, this Reform Catholicism found increasingly strong echoes in the Habsburg monarchy.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the archbishoprics of Salzburg and Passau, whose episcopal sees included substantial portions of Austria, reform bishops such as Leopold Anton Firmian, Joseph Maria Thun, and Leopold Ernst Firmian became enthusiasts for Muratori and adopted what the Swiss historian, Peter Hersche, has called increasingly “philo-Jansenist” views. The indigenous Austrian episcopate largely followed suit, led by successive archbishops of Vienna, Johann Joseph Trautson and Christoph Anton Migazzi (though the latter repented and abjured his youthful enthusiasms by the 1760s).Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, it can be argued that the Jansenist drift, to a large extent shared by the empress, was widespread in the most influential sector of ecclesiastical reformers and provided much of the theological basis of Josephinism.Footnote ⁶⁶

As I have pointed out elsewhere, this “philo-Jansenist” ecclesiastical reform agenda was central to the Haugwitz reform, which envisioned a statist assertion over the Church that is less well known but was quite as radical as anything Joseph undertook in the 1780s.Footnote ⁶⁷ He made it quite clear in his great reform plan of 1747 that “good Catholics are obliged by conscience to provide the resources God has given them,” and took the position that in its demands on the Church the state ought to take a maximalist position because the complaints it was bound to receive would be the same whether the demands were moderate or extreme.Footnote ⁶⁸ Other leading secular reformers of 1750s such as the empress's physician-in-ordinary, Gerard van Swieten, shared these sentiments.Footnote ⁶⁹ But in addition to this neo-Jansenist form of Josephinism there also existed an Enlightenment form, whose adherents were highly critical of the austere and puritanical dimensions of the former. Enlightenment figures such as Kaunitz, while every bit as anti-ultramontane, tended to be less hostile to the Jesuits and certainly did not share the pious, sober, and pessimistic worldview of these “sour pots” as they were known.Footnote ⁷⁰ One might perhaps compare the tone of Gerard van Swieten's Jansenist assessment of a book for Kaunitz compared to one of his more Enlightenment-oriented son, Gottfried. “This is the most abominable book that I know,” Gerard wrote Kaunitz of a volume entitled Pièces Libres de Ferrand, “It contains nothing but the most detestable obscenities like sodomy. All this is described with an affronting license, which is disgusting.”Footnote ⁷¹ By contrast we have this report from Gottfried while serving as Kaunitz's ambassador to Berlin: “I have the honour to send Your Highness three books, which you possibly have not yet seen. The first is the Gazetier cuirassé, a very obscene and licentious work … You must excuse the poor condition of the volume, but I was unable to secure a new copy, and I am sending you this one given to me by a friend that has passed through many hands.”Footnote ⁷² The problem is that the lines that divided the Enlightenment party from the Josephinists are often blurred, and it is important to keep in mind, as Zöllner has pointed out, that not all Josephinists were Enlightenment figures, and not all Enlightenment enthusiasts were Josephinists.Footnote ⁷³ Johann Pezzl, librarian, reader, and secretary of State Chancellor Kaunitz as well as successful author and radical anticlerical proponent of the Enlightenment, put it this way in his famous Skizze von Wien: “These gloomy creatures … are not suited to our times. Fortunately this is no longer a time in which a joyless and sullen religious sect can succeed—and least of all in Vienna … The only good thing about them is that they still tirelessly and courageously keep an eye on the machinations of their former mortal enemies, the ex-Jesuits.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Historians of the era of enlightened absolutism in the Habsburg monarchy have long been aware of the many different influences that bore on the reform dynamic. However, it is important to stress the perhaps obvious point that while these various influences produced a general reform agenda that included reducing corporate privileges; encouraging prosperity; promoting welfare; harnessing the resources of the Church to more rational, tolerant, and secular purposes; and inculcating the virtues of efficiency, commitment, and loyalty in its administration, they did not produce a coherent or integrated reform program. This was partly due to the pragmatism that lay behind the responses to specific problems, but also due to another important dimension of “enlightened absolutism” in the Habsburg monarchy. Many reform ideas originated from an amazingly broad spectrum of individuals and groups, each with its own specific perspective.Footnote ⁷⁵ I am therefore arguing for a different perspective on our understanding of the Habsburg state in the second half of the eighteenth century: Because reform impulses and ideas came as much from the bottom up as from the top down, we must really think of the reform process engaging a wide-ranging sociopolitical spectrum of society—or to put it more succinctly—creating a broad regime of enlightened absolutism. But, while reform was widely recognized within this regime as necessary, the different perspectives on how this was to be achieved and where the primary focus should be continued to exist side by side. Between a neo-Jansenist and secular Enlightenment position in dismantling the Baroque Counter-Reformation edifice, between innovative taxation and public credit schemes in revenue generation, between mercantilist protectionism and more liberal approaches in economics, between maximum centralization of power and a broader consultative process, or between cameralist Sozialdisziplinierung and Enlightenment emancipation, in meeting the challenge of the modernization of society, as well as all the many subtle gradations between these poles, the responses to a perceived crisis of state and society were often as hostile to each other as they were to the antiquated body politic they hoped to replace. This, in my view, is the key to understanding the debates within the regime, and to understanding why enlightened absolutism cannot simply be seen through the lens of the monarchs or be reduced to acts of imperial volition.