Over the past generation or so there has been a tectonic shift in our understanding of the Enlightenment. While the consensus that certain dimensions of the Enlightenment shaped modernity remains largely uncontested, the outstanding feature of recent work on the subject is to stress the degree to which it should be seen as a broad spectrum of regional and ideological variants—or even, as Ian Hunter once suggested, “rival Enlightenments”—that interacted fruitfully with one another. Despite important contributions to the subject from various perspectives and regional foci, a comprehensive view of the “Austrian” Enlightenment remains elusive. Although a substantial portion of the geopolitical state complex ruled by the House of Habsburg lay within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire and was part of the larger German cultural sphere, discussion of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg lands remains very much on the periphery in the growing literature on the German Enlightenment. This massive and trailblazing new study by Franz Leander Fillafer now not only casts fresh light on Enlightenment variants within the Habsburg monarchy but it also examines in detail their legacy and development in the period from 1790 to 1850. This results in a bold new interpretation of the monarchy in the Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Vormärz eras, which will require all scholars in the field to rethink their time-honored generalizations about this period.

Fillafer concludes his study with the paradoxical statement, “The Enlightenment did not cause the French Revolution, rather the reverse: the Revolution created the Enlightenment as a project of secular-democratic modernism” (525). This emerges as one of the central arguments in his book: that there were a number of rival expressions of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg monarchy during the eighteenth century, which have become increasingly lost to us as the notion of a single Enlightenment echoing the ideals of the French Revolution began to take hold among nineteenth-century liberals and subsequent scholars. Among those explored by Fillafer, aspects of what we have increasingly come to call the “Catholic Enlightenment” that come in for particular attention include biblical hermeneutics, natural rights philosophies, and Newtonian physics. Above all, of course, the sweeping ecclesiastical reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, generally subsumed under the term “Josephinism,” fundamentally transformed the Counter Reformation edifice of the monarchy. These developments, Fillafer argues, spurred a dynamic that fundamentally transformed the social fabric and perceptions of the world, leading to social and cognitive shifts that proved to be irreversible. The primacy of class prestige and the dominance of Catholic orthodoxy were replaced by an individualization and moralization of belief and by civil merit ethics. Epistemological premises migrated from evidence based on authority to empiricism, and notions of princely patrimony gave way to the principle of the rule of law. All this led to what Fillafer calls a “habitualized” Enlightenment among civil servants, scholars, and clergy that survived well into the Vormärz and long after the political agendas of the Enlightenment had become suspect. As a result, “the structures of the Enlightenment continued working even as it was being combated as an ideology” (524).

This leads us to the heart of the book; namely, the fundamental reassessment of the Habsburg monarchy in the Revolutionary and Metternichian era. Under the rubric of “Wissenskulturen” (knowledge cultures), Filaffer shows how biblical hermeneuticists and natural scientists continued on the path of the Enlightenment by blocking Romantic scientific concepts of speculative theology and natural philosophy. In their animosity against subjectivism and speculation we can we see here the roots of why Austria by the late nineteenth century remained, in Karl Přibram's words, “the only outpost of nominalistic reasoning east of the Rhine.” In the sphere of agrarian reforms, he demonstrates how the Theresian and Josephinian reforms left permanent structural legacies and saw the civil service continue to implement policies designed to unleash agro-capitalist labor and the ousting of the nobility from the administration of justice and local administration. Civil servants and scholars adapted economic policies entirely in the spirit of Adam Smith aimed at developing a liberal property regime, and the monarchy was gradually transformed from a conglomerate of independent economic areas to an integrated domestic market. Above all, the codification of civil law continued apace, culminating in the famous Civil Code of 1811, which proclaimed the private autonomy and legal equality of the monarchy's citizens. While its framers used the natural law arguments of the Enlightenment, they successfully depoliticized them by casting them in the form of an objective, universally valid system. This resulted in the liberation of property from social ties and regional restrictions that previously prevailed, the stringent separation of law and morality, and the emancipation of the judicial process from religion and the welfare state, resulting in an independent sphere of civil liberties, private autonomy, and general legal capacity, which was neither willed by God nor granted by the prince but was based on its inherent validity.

While this brief summary of some of Fillafer's salient arguments cannot do justice to the complexity and sophistication of this truly innovate study, the overall argument that the Enlightenment remained an effective force in the Habsburg monarchy after 1792 through institutions and patterns of understanding even while detaching itself from its previous political expectations is persuasively made. The book therefore not only shows that the Habsburg Empire in the period under consideration was hardly the bulwark of the old order that it has frequently made out to be, but that the Enlightenment continued to shape “its logic of government and its epistemological regime, its legal culture and its social structure” (518). Finally, it is notable that Fillafer eschews the term “Austrian Enlightenment” in favor of “Habsburgian Enlightenment,” giving credit both to the pluralism of the empire and to the uniqueness of its Enlightenment.