Joseph Richter, a prolific writer of the Viennese Enlightenment, published a satirical dictionary in 1782 called the ABC Book for Big Children. Here, under the heading “men of letters” (Gelehrte), he wrote, “Emperor Augustus brought them to his table. Among the great nobility of our time, they eat out on the steps.”Footnote 1 This criticism of insufficient patronage, marginalization, and loss of status seemed to come at an odd time. By 1781, the current Emperor and Habsburg monarch, Joseph II, freed censorship to the extent that Richter's satire could be published; writers sought to live from their works; and Vienna sustained a vibrant intellectual scene among the booksellers, coffee shops, and Freemason lodges. Yet Richter's lamentation reveals a complex reaction to the transition to a more modern, participatory, and even democratic knowledge culture.
This essay explores self-conscious writings on print from the early 1780s when hundreds of pamphlets and several periodicals weighed in on censor reforms and the ideal of a Viennese Enlightenment. In these works, authors discussed the effects of books and readers, the benefits and potential drawbacks of press freedoms, the role of the state and religion in the public marketplace of ideas, and what it meant to be an author. Through these discussions, the press bore witness to palpable cultural, intellectual, social, and economic changes. Vienna emerged abruptly from the patriarchal patronage of state and church to become a functioning but competitive book market. Writers negotiated a new intellectual culture and system of socioeconomic status and support while they feared their progress would not last. As a result, they were highly concerned with and protective of the status of the intellectual and access to the print market. These prolific writers saw themselves as a new generation of cosmopolitan “enlighteners” and celebrated increased freedom of ideas, yet they worried about the effects of the modern model of producing ideas. As enthusiasm for proliferation of print spread, so did fears for the future of book production and an idealized image of former days when benevolent elites supported deserving intellectuals. The shift in intellectual culture from one based almost entirely in the court and religious institutions to a public, self-sustained, and self-regulating one evoked concerns that were just as pervasive as the enthusiasm. As a result, shifting ideals and contradictory practices were the rule among Enlightenment authors who engaged through print with the change in book production and consumption.
Historians contrast publication with patronage as opposing paradigms of knowledge production. Book history characterizes the independence provided by publishing for profit as a precondition to modernity and progress. Whether focusing on the publishing practices of major intellectuals or on “hack authors,” historians have sought to provide a clear picture of the changes in the production and consumption of books in order to emphasize the transitional nature of the prerevolutionary world of ideas.Footnote 2 Such discussions of the status of the author and the economics of print are important, for the transformations of the eighteenth century show the degree to which publication practices are aligned with political, social, and cultural change.
Yet most historians of books divide their focus. One area of study is the intellectual and cultural transformations brought through books. A separate one is the business of publication: who sells what to whom and what role the authors, publishers, and consumers have in that process. The first often neglects the social and economic concerns of authors. The second does not focus on authors' attitudes or desires. This analysis of late-eighteenth-century debates on free press in Vienna shows that writers, while reconceptualizing the place of books and authors for societal development, were also negotiating a new socioeconomic place for themselves and attempting to seize control of book production. In a 2003 article, Geoffrey Turnovsky argued that both types of book history fail to reflect what authors in the eighteenth century thought of the changing economic and social practices behind literary production. He insisted that the literary market itself was the product of authorial practices, and those practices were forced by the decline of patronage. Thus, everything modern about eighteenth-century authorship—its independence or the alienation it reflected, for example—was not a clear goal but an outcome of a structural shift in literary practice.Footnote 3 The fretful Viennese authors experienced the varied effects of this major transformation. Authors missed patronage and lamented the proliferation of books even as they found an independent public voice with a broad readership.
Democratization of ideas and democratization of society happened slowly and painfully over the eighteenth century in the rest of Europe.Footnote 4 Yet in Vienna, these typically gradual processes seemed to emerge suddenly through the regime change of 1780. Though historians and others contest the extent to which the 1780s differed from Maria Theresa's reign, contemporaries experienced Joseph II's first years in sole reign as a time of radical change.Footnote 5 Germanist Lesli Bodi argued that the frenzy of publication in the early 1780s resulted from the pervasive belief that press freedoms were temporary, so authors and intellectuals felt they needed to take advantage of this “thaw” while they could.Footnote 6 Austrian historiography has centered on the monarchy, assuming the popular press emergent under Joseph II's rule is of little lasting interest compared to the actions of the state and top aristocracy. Ernst Wangermann's recent study of the political pamphlets of this era reveals the complex processes of politicization in response to Josephin reforms. Unlike other historians of the era, Wangermann asserts the importance of the pamphlet press, yet he ascribes the origins of pro-Josephinist pamphlets to discreet commissions from the king and his ministers.Footnote 7 He suggests an autonomous and critical public formed after 1784, but prior to that his narrative is one of hegemony for he contends Joseph II controlled even anti-Josephinist tracts since he set the terms and topics of debate.Footnote 8 This interpretation negates the real freedoms of thought and expression experienced in Vienna in the years following 1780. Once the emperor initiated the changes that would be seen as “press freedoms” by contemporaries, these writers, the next generation of authors mentored by them, and their ideological opponents prolifically engaged public issues in print. Writers of pulp would become numerous enough to earn their own nickname—the Ten Kreuzer Authors. Pro-Enlightenment writers did not have so handy a moniker, though Robert Keil called a subset of them the “Viennese Friends.”Footnote 9 Ideological orientation as Aufklärer (Enlighteners), their prolific publishing record, and the setting in which they developed defined them. This article shows pro-Enlightenment authors developed independent, personal, and at times conflicting reactions to Joseph II's reforms, and they faithfully conveyed those reactions in print. Those who embraced the Habsburg capital's newfound freedoms nevertheless reflected the uncertainties of the era in their attitudes toward authorship and the book trade.
Vienna's Aufklärer: The Emergence of a New Public Voice
A relatively cohesive group of authors embraced many of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the reforms the emperor instituted in censorship, the church, and society. This circle included Alois Blumauer, a former Jesuit novitiate from Steyr in upper Austria. He ended up in Vienna supporting his literary life first through teaching, then as a censor. A poet and prolific editor, Blumauer was responsible for several journals of long duration and international readership. There was also Joseph Franz Ratschky, a Viennese poet, bureaucrat, and journal editor. His travels on Imperial business inspired poems and letters lamenting being removed from his circle of friends in the capital. Another poet, Johann Baptist Alxinger was closely tied to the other two, but his poetry tended to be more cosmopolitan, conceptually sophisticated, and of longer gestation. Joseph Richter wrote satires, mostly, and signed on to edit the group's poetry almanac, but backed out in favor of traveling. He also had a son and later married; that combined with frequent illness made him less sociable than those mentioned above.Footnote 10 Otto von Gemmingen, also an acquaintance, was another active writer and journal editor. Johann Rautenstrauch, an advocate and frequent commentator on pamphlet debates, though liminal to the friendship circle, was wrapped up in their ideas and publications. There were others as well: poets, academics, bureaucrats, and teachers in their late twenties and early thirties who identified ideologically with the Enlightenment and viewed their faction as an exciting, transformative force in society. Blumauer, Ratschky, and Alxinger often attended the academically oriented meetings of the freemasonic lodge “True Harmony” and published in its journals. In the lodge and elsewhere, these youth met with older mentors—including state scientist Joseph von Sonnenfels, poet Michael Denis, and mineralogist Ignatz von Born—who found them jobs and, in Born's case, had daughters to flirt with. They also attended salons at Charlotte and Franz von Greiner's home. The Greiners' daughter, novelist Caroline Pichler, would write of their influence on her. The authors' friendships formed in the late 1770s, but for these idealistic youth with literary talent and desire for fame, their communal experience of the transformations of 1780 and 1781 created a strong, active cultural group.
These writers were born in the 1750s, when the creation of a cadre of productive men of letters was by no means expected for Vienna. The government of lower Austria assessed the literary situation in 1751, stating, “Except for five or six ecclesiastics and maybe a pair of profane, there were no other writers at hand, and consequently no hope that book production would flower.”Footnote 11 But by the end of Maria Theresa's long reign conditions were in place for the flood of publications to come. The empress and reformer Gerard Van Swieten made the process of censorship more efficient and promoted reading and the book trade. Yet continued divisions in censorship duties between institutions, some of which were dominated by the archbishop and conservative Catholics, ensured erratic restrictions on legal exposure to contemporary ideas among Maria Theresa's subjects. In the 1760s and 1770s none, except perhaps writers of popular religion, could depend on their works seeing print.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, by Joseph II's succession to sole rule, there was a literate public, and writers had tested their skills in the print marketplace.
Authors proliferated and so did printers and booksellers. One of the circle of Enlightenment friends wrote a multivolume description of Vienna in 1788. Johann Pezzl's entry on publishers evoked the changes to the business of publishing over the preceding decades. He described the situation when Jesuits controlled the very few and very poor-quality presses. He evoked a limited world of books that dispersed superstitious ideas on poor-quality materials. Bad type and bad exchange of knowledge went hand in hand. In direct contrast to the pre-pamphlet flood era, publishing houses in the early 1780s proliferated. Pezzl's narrative described the germination of the expanded publishing industry; once tolerated, ideas and authors accumulated until they spontaneously engendered a response in the industry: “Thus came into being the twenty publishers, which are presently in Vienna, and the approximately 118 presses that are set in motion.” The major publishers who preexisted censorship reorganization (he named the major firms of Trattner, Kurzbek, and Ghelen) added more presses while new publishers emerged to take advantage of market growth. With the proliferation of books came specialization and each bookseller and printer became known for certain types, and importantly for cosmopolitan Vienna, languages of print. Pezzl reported, “Trattner alone has thirty-one presses, and besides the typical Turkish works, he prints a lot of schoolbooks, calendars, and the court patents. Kurzbek has fifteen presses; he prints oriental and Illyrian books. Baumeister prints a lot of new and old Greek. Gay prints French. Schmidt, Wappler, and Weimar print the most and best among the remainder.”Footnote 13
Though a big city by eighteenth-century standards, Vienna had a small and cohesive intellectual culture. The city's unique mix of cosmopolitanism and provincialism infused the worldview and literary products of its writers. The capital of both a multinational monarchy and the international Holy Roman Empire, Vienna attracted diverse residents with the common goal of benefiting from the urban and political opportunities there. The city's rich baroque culture, political import, and diverse population united its residents. Yet, in book production, prestige of the university, academic and scientific institutions, and international recognition, Leipzig, Göttingen, and even Berlin surpassed the Habsburg capital. Because of competition with Prussia in particular in the wake of wars, this was a mark on Viennese pride. Even at home, intellectuals and readers preferred the products of Britain and France. In the wake of the Seven Years' War, local loyalty inspired a movement to advocate for and defend Vienna's intellectual culture, particularly through developments in the press.
As authors became more enmeshed with a literary market, society as a whole was transforming. Under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the monarchy ennobled people for productive work that would have been seen as distinctly ignoble before.Footnote 14 In the middle of the eighteenth century, the only people identified with Enlightenment and considered learned were of high noble status and ministers at court.Footnote 15 By the 1780s, individuals of middling or lower social status increasingly sought recognition for their abilities, even if economic stability would by no means be assured as a result.Footnote 16 Most of the members of the literary circle discussed here did not have the family wealth to support a life of the mind, so earning money through publishing or other work was necessary. Because the system of publication made it difficult for writers to live off their work alone, a day job with the state and its manageable working hours joined professorships and tutoring as career options for intellectuals. Minor bureaucratic posts in Imperial cultural institutions such as censorship, the library, and the natural history collection combined with publishing for profit supplanted church careers as support for the able-minded.
Monastic orders had been the primary provider of education, intellectual exchange, and sustenance and housing for anyone of middle or low social status who wanted to live a life of the mind. The banning of the Jesuit order followed in 1781 by Joseph II's abolition of “non-useful” orders thus had direct effects on the capital city's intellectual culture.Footnote 17 Alois Blumauer's adopted order dissolved; a decade later he profitably satirized monks. Leopold Haschka was a Jesuit who taught in Krems when the order was dissolved. Within a few years, he was having an affair with Charlotte von Greiner.Footnote 18 But many were not so lucky. Karl Leonard Reinhold, known for his works explaining Kant, epitomized this transition and its effects on authors. Reinhold took his vows in an order that Joseph II did not abolish, and his growing desire to live as a free, publishing intellectual in the wake of the censorship reforms led to his flight from Habsburg lands to Weimar.Footnote 19 The circle of “Enlighteners” lamented the loss of this promising intellectual to Protestant lands as a result of Catholic rigidity. These personal connections to religious institutions ensured writers directed attention to religious transformations; often the most biting satire they produced was directed at the monastic institutions of which many of them had been a part. United through friendship, regional loyalties, and reactions to traditional religion and hierarchy, the writers studied here saw themselves as part of a cohesive party of active intellectuals and reformers. Their group influenced their ideas even as they voiced independent opinions in their publications.
State Censor Reforms and the Reaction in Print
The censorship reforms initiated by Joseph II upon the death of his mother created structural shifts in intellectual practice. In 1781, the emperor issued his arguments to the public on censorship. He asserted that educated people made more industrious subjects, so it was better to let in a few worthless books than to bar a single beneficial one. Joseph II also suggested states only showed themselves weak if they acted against a critical book and derided the subjective nature of a system dependent on individual censors with varying opinions on what was good or dangerous.Footnote 20 Yet the transformation in the publishing climate in Vienna did not wait for the king's statement. A 1781 epistolary work that chronicled the ensuing response in the press dated “the first fruits of publishing freedom” to November 1780, concurrent with the queen's death. Maria Theresa's death was publicly (and prolifically) lamented, but the instant change in print culture and writers' celebratory display of freedom of expression showed dissatisfaction with her regime.Footnote 21 Anticipation of what Joseph II would do as sole ruler proved right. Censorship reforms were comprehensive and quick. Periodicals, pamphlets, and theater gained a great degree of freedom. Popular novels and folk pieces retained more oversight than works that addressed a learned audience, for the emperor believed the masses were less grounded by critical judgment.Footnote 22 He also preserved scrutiny of alternatives to rational religion and science, particularly pseudo-scientific works on alchemy and spirituality. But bureaucracy limited those remaining restrictions—one contemporary described an overwhelmed censor office uninterested in strict control of ideas. In a monarchy where Jesuits concerned with souls once worked as censors, avid readers on the lookout for free books took the job, warned only to watch out for “nation-endangering prejudice.”Footnote 23
Though some degree of censorship remained, a perception of instant change in this easily negotiable intellectual culture emerged instantly. Resulting enthusiasm and discussions of press freedoms culminated in the concentrated years of pamphlet and periodical publication called the Broschürenflut. During this “pamphlet flood,” Vienna transformed to support an active press that was paralleled only in London; 1,772 works appeared in print in the eighteen months following Joseph II's official proclamation on his censor policies.Footnote 24 Whereas in 1780, only three new periodicals appeared, twenty-two came out in 1781. The following year saw the publication of twenty-eight new journals or newspapers in Austrian lands.Footnote 25 Print became a substantial sector of the economy; it controlled three million Reichsthaler a year compared to the mere 100,000 in publishing profits before the reform.Footnote 26 New pamphlets appeared daily in the coffee shops, reading rooms, and private salons of Vienna. As one contemporary periodical noted, “Every person, from houseboys who delight in murder mysteries and gracious employers who perfume a pamphlet at their toilet, on down to brooding, system-building intellectuals—everyone reads.”Footnote 27 Vienna's population stood at 200,000, packed for the most part in a small, overcrowded inner city. In this setting, changes to publication were tangible in the pamphlets being carried out of the publishing houses, the activity surrounding booksellers, the newspapers that advertised the latest prints, the coffee shops crowded with readers and reading material, and the general conversation on the streets and in salons, public parks, and private gatherings.
This information revolution fascinated both locals and the international reading public. Just as with the post-Reformation explosion in print, the British pamphlet press during their civil war, and even today's exponential increase in access to knowledge through new technology, late-eighteenth-century witnesses to Vienna's Broschürenflut wondered what effect rapid and free exchange of ideas would bring to a newly debating public. Prominent international journals thus covered the developments of the Viennese pamphlet press.Footnote 28 The local press naturally commented on the changes as well. Alois Blumauer reviewed the effects of reform on the publishing industry at the end of 1781 and concluded, “In this city there is now much reading, even more writing, of all things.”Footnote 29 Rapid change combined with cosmopolitan and critical attention resulted in a self-conscious evaluation of what print does and for and by whom it should be produced. In this process, the ideals and concerns of authors who identified themselves with the cosmopolitan Enlightenment evolved from the early celebration of the “free” press to more fraught reflections on publishing, authorship, books, and the print market.
Works on the emergent literary market covered a variety of issues important to the history of the book. There were eighty-six pamphlets published on the topic of authorship after the censorship reforms. Observers focused surprised commentary on the proliferation of writers, and most attention went to them. Yet readers, cultural institutions, and publishing were not ignored. Other rounds of pamphlet debates produced works on topics such as the university, whether or how an Enlightenment could exist in Habsburg lands, the role of the church in intellectual production, the culture of ideas in Vienna, and social issues related to literacy, education, and expanding publishing.Footnote 30 Even city descriptions sought to quantify and qualitatively describe the authors and books produced in Vienna.Footnote 31 Other volumes, often in the form of epistolary works, looked outward to Paris, Protestant German cities and university towns, or other regions to provide models for the formation of Vienna's own literary practices.Footnote 32 Periodicals, too, entered the fray. A yearly poetry almanac included poems about literary practices and authorship. The weekly Realzeitung occupied itself exclusively with cataloging, reviewing, and promoting book production in the nation. Other periodicals directed toward select social groups compiled observations about society that frequently discussed reading, publishing, and the role of books in progress.Footnote 33 The circle of friends inspired by the Enlightenment produced many of these journals. Otto von Gemmingen, Alois Blumauer, Joseph Franz Ratschky, and Joseph Richter wrote and edited periodicals that, while aimed at different audiences and that pursued different goals, all covered themes related to publication and the new availability of books. This nascent literary market in Vienna was very self-involved.
The patterns of the newly expanded press established themselves rapidly through the first topic of public interest—the political transition. After November 1780, the press first printed eulogies to the queen, then responses to those eulogies, then criticism of those responses. As an anonymous author characterized it, “after these defenses, observations on the defenses; after these observations, impartial thoughts; after these thoughts, other judges roused themselves ex officio.”Footnote 34 Polemical pieces suited to rapid public commentary were the easiest to publish and suited public demand in this time of heightened political attention. Such works digested the forty years of Maria Theresa's reign, creating a politically informed and engaged reading public. The subjects of praise and the areas of silence in these discussions indicated the political inclination of the author. Recurrent themes of the empress as the good mother and emotional depictions of her family's sadness over her loss furthered anticipation for her son's rule. The eulogies even provided authors the opportunity to articulate their hopes to the king and the public for the future.Footnote 35 After the eulogies slowed, 1781 and 1782 saw numerous pamphlets and periodicals that lauded Joseph II as the source of promise for the Habsburg lands. The works by Enlightenment-leaning authors in effect pronounced, “the queen is dead, long live the king.”Footnote 36 Maria Theresa ruled throughout the living memory of most, yet anticipation for political change through her successor threatened to overshadow achievements that were forty years in the making. Writers took advantage of their new role as public commentators to praise the king for the reforms he undertook but nudge him in areas where they thought more could be done.
For intellectuals, the changes in the publishing industry and its effects on the social and economic status of authors became a focus for reimagining civic life or expressing discontent. The unsettling, if liberating, transformations ensured writers were compelled to negotiate a new relationship to the state and a new role for the reading public. Public debates provided access to information and escalating politicization; writers felt themselves more connected to the monarchy, more affected by its decisions, and more able critically to evaluate the government than ever. Historians have seen in the pamphlet debates little of interest except as they confirm a narrative of Josephinist Reform Catholicism or Enlightened Absolutism. Ernst Wangermann's work skillfully depicts a developing public, but even he suggests the early pamphlet debates attest to Joseph II's absolutism. Education reforms and political and religious transformations created the conditions necessary for an active debating public, yet once formed, authors, ideas, and the public were not a product of Joseph II's will. Pamphlet rhetoric articulated instead a sense of a new, more equal relationship between subject and king. Anticipating positive transformations from books, writers admonished one another to live up to the king's expectations and prove themselves worthy of his beneficence. One pamphleteer argued “it is incumbent upon us to justify this freedom before the eyes of all nations through our employment of the freedom of the press; we could certainly put to worthier use this priceless gift of the champion of humanity if we showed ourselves, so far as we could, to be his colleagues in pursuing the grand design [of Enlightenment].”Footnote 37 This statement conveyed the equalizing power of books by portraying the actions of the public to be as necessary as the laws enacted from above for progress. But “pursuing the grand design” was not simply a matter of ability. Freedom came with a moral responsibility to act autonomously for intellectual progress.
The Pains of Authorial Independence
In response to Joseph II's controversial practices as a ruler and the resultant difficulties he encountered, even those ideologically aligned with the emperor's social and cultural goals declared independent power for authors and their readers. While the emperor still contended with the cardinal and aristocracy, intellectuals claimed themselves autonomous and thus capable of detached criticism and rational progress. Authors believed they guided the developing public, for books and public discussions of books changed minds. Yet if published writers without their abilities, worldview, and independence from the church made sufficient noise, then the concept of the virtuous, independent author would be challenged, as would optimistic ideas about the role of publishing in progress. From the start, articulations of the social responsibilities of Viennese authors and the potential of books limited the types of works the intellectual elite would tolerate. Too many insignificant or anti-Enlightenment publications threatened their ideals.
Pamphlet rhetoric acknowledged that developments in press freedoms resulted from the king's grace, but described the production and quality of publications as completely autonomous. A 1781 pamphlet, The Contemporary Press Freedom in Vienna, argued that free development of talents in the Austrian Enlightenment—a result of press reforms—could benefit all by stimulating the public to industriousness and charity. Though the essay was critical of the types of works being published in the aftermath of censor reforms, it perpetuated the optimistic view that access to knowledge and resulting improvement in reason would lead to a population that was more productive and virtuous.Footnote 38 Pro-reform writers believed print did much more than advance the particular causes of intellectuals—books advanced the state in ways a king and bureaucracy could not. Integrating authors and the print market into cameralist economic and political theories, the panegyrics to restrictions of censorship argued that publications furthered the common good by ending prejudice, promoted the development of useful ideas, stimulated industry, supplemented government, and allowed authors to serve the public.Footnote 39 Writers and reading publics were informed and active subjects. The new freedoms combined with a sense of authorial social responsibility ensured writers would have a critical voice, for state and church reforms demanded attention.
Intellectuals attempted to exert the pressure of public opinion on the state to protect the newly won independence of writers. To compensate for lost forms of support from elite patronage or church institutions, writers proclaimed the need for more economic and social protections for intellectuals in the form of government-based institutional support. Furthermore, the church and conservative forces continued to dominate the university, lower levels of education, publishing, and popular beliefs. To correct these perceived problems, writers argued the Habsburg lands had only to emulate Prussia and other German Protestant lands in forming an academy in Vienna, further restricting censorship, and limiting the political and even cultural power of religious institutions.Footnote 40 This differed markedly from Joseph II's position. One pamphlet that focused on the disparity between Protestant and Catholic German territories connected access to books to well-being. The anonymous author blamed the backwardness of the Catholic state on restrictions on thought. In Protestant territories, the author claimed, people could read a vast number of books and “thereby remarkably increase their knowledge.” The title neatly encapsulated this theme in the pamphlet debates: “Why is or was up to this point the prosperity of the Protestant lands so much more advanced than that of the Catholic ones?” The writer went further by claiming there were “practical philosophers” among the farmers and the lower orders in these non-Catholic territories.Footnote 41 Through comparative assessments, writers provided for the king and the public a model for developing intellectual culture that would solve their own social and economic concerns. They suggested the state provide infrastructure and economic support while the population, retaining the dynamism of the freedom of ideas, contributed knowledge and resultant progress. They removed the problem of this new market—the equalizing but indiscriminating system of monetary and societal rewards for popular publications—and retained their ideal of free access to books for the population.
The poets, Freemasons, and satirists discussed here deemed such structural support essential and romanticized traditional forms of aristocratic and Imperial patronage. As seen in Josef Richter's lament about elite abandonment of intellectuals, writers expressed a longing for the very social hierarchy that publicity and the press challenged. Considering the atmosphere in which he worked, this was understandable. Richter faced continuous money problems despite publishing profusely. He achieved popular renown even with heavy competition in the print market. Occasionally, his work brought him windfalls, such as an impressive 1,000 florins he received from the popular ABC Book for Big Children. But illnesses, an illegitimate child, a wife to support, and frequent problems with censors contributed to his financial problems.Footnote 42 To cope, he campaigned for and received a pension from the monarch, asked nobility for patronage, and even turned to the freemasonic lodges in Vienna for support.Footnote 43 Financial instability led him to mythologize a model of intellectual production the modern world condemned for its potential restriction of ideas through a system of elite patronage that depended on personal relationships. Instead, Richter presumed at that time, such a system could provide discernment and improvement by offering more support to great writers while inhibiting poor ones. The literary market, which demanded that texts appeal to a broad base of consumers, was not discriminating, but a generous patron could bring about selective refinement and increased depth to knowledge production.Footnote 44 This longing for an idealized past form of patronage showed the anxieties produced by upheaval in methods of production and dissemination of ideas.
Yet where unsystematic preference and personal relationships existed and interfered with the ability of the pro-Enlightenment writers to publish and gain income and respect from their works, intellectuals campaigned against this abuse through the press and before the forum of public opinion. The newly expanded publishing industry was not a transparent, democratic, or even law-abiding system.Footnote 45 Although authors and publishers had close working relationships by necessity in this city, the two groups were also mutually antagonist as a result of conflicting interests. The rapid increase in the numbers of major publishing houses led to some competition in paying capable writers. But, easier profit from reprints proved tempting for many of the presses; in response to this practice, authors conflicted directly or through pamphlet debates with their publishers.Footnote 46 The state supported the policy of reprinting works originally published by rival presses in other German-speaking territories for economic and regional interests. Despite the monarchy's size, North German presses published seventy percent of the books produced between 1780 and 1782.Footnote 47 Authors opposed Imperial policy and declared unauthorized reproductions an outright theft of intellectual property. They also feared if publishers earned significant profits from the printing of works free to them, they would have no incentive to support authors who produced original works in the Habsburg lands.
Georg Phillipp Wucherer, much to his profit, successfully used personal contacts with the king and individuals in the censor office to push the limits in the illegal book trade. A later historian attributed to this publisher traitorous activities that politicized commoners and turned them against the enlightened policies of Joseph II. His practice of reprinting works from well-known German authors without permission and the competitive pay he offered authors allowed his rapid success once he entered the trade in books in 1783.Footnote 48 Contemporaries also found him controversial. Other presses expressed concern over his flooding the market with cheap reprints. Authors got involved, even in the case of a petty dispute between printers over an employee. Incensed by the works critical to the monarchy that Wucherer published and also commissioned, dissatisfied with his practice of producing unauthorized reprints, and questioning his loyalty to the state because of his protestant, non-Austrian background, author and criminal defender Johann Rautenstrauch accused him in print in 1786 of “piracy, profiteering, and unpatriotic bearing.”Footnote 49 Rautenstrauch attempted to shame him publicly for the damage his under-the-table trade was doing to authors, censors, and publishing.Footnote 50 Personal enmity and profit loss probably motivated Rautenstrauch, but his outrage fixed on a conviction that stealing intellectual property and soliciting boundary-pushing criticism threatened the state. He argued Wucherer, by successfully setting up shop in pornography, pamphlets, and illicit reprints, hindered the goals set by proponents of press freedoms. After all, one could not improve the subjects' minds and morals if their literary fare consisted of stolen property or titillating works offensive to state and religion. The monarchy, ruled by a king seen as having his hands in everything, created a legal and economic system of publishing rife with inconsistency and stifling to legitimate competition.
Rautenstrauch's campaign implied condemnation of arbitrary monarchical favors at the same time it condemned publishing criticism of the monarchy; he sustained a rational critique of monopolies and mercantilist policies in the print market. The monarchy nurtured the creation of a modern public through extensive educational, religious, and censorship reforms. Yet those same reforms enabled the private individual to issue public demands for legality over arbitrary rule, for order over inconsistency. This was Rautenstrauch's idea of patriotism: the individual's willingness to step in to regulate and improve what the absolutist state overlooked, even when the state was partially complicit in illegality. He hoped public watchdogs such as he would result in a well-functioning, ordered economy based on fair principles. In the transformed print market of Vienna, personal financial struggles over publications thus became a platform for exposing the failures of absolutism and the possibilities for progress when citizens were able to act on the public's behalf. This public squabble over publishing practices showed that censorship reform liberated campaigners such as Rautenstrauch to express their love of country through criticism of hierarchy and inequality. Yet exercising this liberty did nothing to stabilize the social and economic positions of intellectual reformers. This problem motivated writers to take action.
Establishing New Social Hierarchies for Authors
Direct experience of socioeconomic transition led “Enlighteners” to advocate a new social model that also furthered their intellectual and cultural interests. Their identities centered on authorial independence, but they also recognized the financial and social insecurity faced by authors free of institutions of power. No longer clergy and distancing themselves from the state, knowledge producers sought a new identity, support system, and set of relationships. The equalizing nature of print allowed opportunity for writers with ability. The market, rather than state and church, regulated the production and distribution of ideas. But, by creating lower-class authors, the transformation in print culture also made visible the problem of poor intellectuals. Such writers attempted but failed to live off their writings alone and became frustrated by a modern world that did not, in their view, sufficiently patronize scholarship. Authors also did not have a clear place in society—social hierarchy in Vienna reflected family background or bureaucratic responsibility, but not the contributions they viewed as important to society.
Despite the hope inspired by “freedom,” practical and personal concerns over emergent socioeconomic problems came to influence intellectual arguments about authors and readers. Pamphlets sought to define what it meant to be an author, establish an ideal of authorship, and classify book production to protect authorial interests. As a result, a restrictive view of intellectual culture emerged from the very group that most celebrated the increased liberties in knowledge production. Their pamphlets defined authors as having taste, independence, and sensibility in direct contrast to a mass of hack authors who published pamphlets to fill their bellies.Footnote 51 Rather than embrace principals of open access to publication, pro-Enlightenment authors constructed social and cultural barriers to the rank of author.
The literati marketed themselves as a cohesive group with a special place in society. By identifying the intellectual elite as a meritorious and virtuous party, such authors provided the basis for a new means to control the press. In various periodicals and personal correspondence, writers called themselves “Aufklärer” (Enlighteners), “Gelehrte” (learned folks), or “Dichter” (poets). One anonymous author called for the creation of a united group of “vortreffliche Schriftsteller” (excellent authors) or “scharfsinnige Denker” (sharp-witted thinkers) to further knowledge for public benefit. These author-intellectuals would write on useful subjects in such a way as to change minds. Only such works, “presented with noble frankness, supported with forceful reasoned conclusion, and decorated with all the magical powers of wit,” would emanate from this party.Footnote 52
The new class of author reflected a modern world where private individuals could attain respect and status through ability and usefulness to society. One pamphlet praised Joseph von Sonnenfels along such lines. Of the publication of his patriotic university lectures, it claimed, “They comfort us after the hundreds and hundreds of fleeting products, which after a time go the way of all paper, with the hope that our men have not really lost all desire to, if not save, at least not allow our national literature to be wholly riddled with vermin.”Footnote 53 The author, Leopold Alois Hoffmann, argued that popular writers wasted their promise and even betrayed Austria in not elevating the literature of the fatherland. Hoffman claimed virtue in following the more virtuous though difficult footsteps of the superior intellectual and “great man” rather than seeking gain through popularity. This pamphlet reflected the struggle to form a proud collective identity for “Aufklärer.” Reverting to traditional terminology of social hierarchy, Hoffman sought an antidote to the stigmas of a newly active and ephemeral press in a new type of benevolent hierarchy and centralized leadership.
The discussion of intellectual betters conveyed a continued comfort with elitism, though transferred to a new cultural group. As access to books and authorship increased, even progressive authors responded by constructing a new, informal means of exclusion. Self-identified “learned” writers defined themselves in opposition to writers of lesser merit. Just as a distinguished academic received marks of respect, writers classified lower on the scale of abilities received condescension. Hack authors, whom Hoffmann evoked in his discussion of vermin, was thus one of the many fads in print during the Broschürenflut. It inspired thirty-three pamphlets in the early 1780s.Footnote 54 One satire portrayed tireless hacks who pledged, “Nothing, absolutely nothing shall escape our pen.” To prove their dedication, the public was told to look forward to such enlightening manuscripts as “On salami” and “About the difference between summer and winter.”Footnote 55 As in London's Grub Street and Paris's Literary Underground, popular Austrian writers posed a threat to the intellectuals' elevated tone. One pseudonymous author recommended imprisonment for any “little minds with loud voices.”Footnote 56 Popular writers earned ridicule for their derivative writings filled with fluff, their financial dependence on the ten Kreuzers earned per pamphlet, and their social pretensions in attempting to live off their reputations as “authors.” Nothing concrete distinguished the “intellectuals” and the “hacks”—all used the same methods and forms of debate. Though hyperbolic, rhetoric on penny authors revealed that the new class of public writers hoped to protect the market and keep the industry and public's money to themselves.
Concerns about the print market thus reduced to questions of whether a writer wrote for profit or for the sake of knowledge and society. An author's motivations could not be conclusively determined, so the speed of production provided a basis for distinguishing between an intellectual and a hack author. The narrator of an epistolary work claimed just as he heard about the prospect of a thaw in censorship, ten pamphlets suddenly appeared. After investigating their origins, he sarcastically observed “well-rested and ready minds defy the passage of time, to sweat over one work for years is considered ridiculous by them.” If speed was worthy of derision, so were numbers. Hacks proliferated. Of their numbers one author wrote, “why don't I say how many hundreds? Because the number of Viennese authors has climbed so high, that one could make entire companies with them.”Footnote 57 Things had changed since the days when lower Austria counted its seven authors. The craze for novelty in print and the popularity of superficial topics were targets in condemnations of new or hack authors. The immediacy of pamphlets suited them for any public debate, and the discussions they sustained were quickly worn out and forgotten.Footnote 58 The ephemeral contributions fueled condemnation of the penny press even as the very people who critiqued it took part in pamphlet debates.
Distinguishing hack authors from “noble” ones thus demanded more than measurements of speed. Authors proposed holding publications to a standard of taste determined by discerning patrons or critical and enlightened reviewers. Josef Arnold von Lewenau, in a 1782 pamphlet, painted a direct contrast between the two authorial social orders. The rapidly publishing hack was of “a poor character, bristling with chiding treatments of honorable matters and with various effects of an ignoble soul.” On the other hand, people with knowledge to contribute were not guided by fads but by virtue and truth. He emphasized the limits of the new economic means of supporting ideas, as true masterpieces took years to write. Lewenau and others like him sought to limit authorship by definition to moral individuals of an enlightened temperament and extensive education. Alois Blumauer, in a pamphlet that discussed the new writers, differentiated between books made from the senses and books made with fingers. This implied that pamphlets were mundane and their producers mere tradesmen.Footnote 59 While hack authors used the press for the ignoble aims of monetary gain or access to elite society, popular Catholic writers who opposed rational church reforms also used pamphlets to retain undue control over the minds of the population. Enlighteners often wrote to condemn religious works for spreading superstition and backwardness. Blumauer argued that writing involved effort, independence, and virtue grounded in the author's social responsibility to reason and improve the state. A prolific author himself, he suggested these traits and practices were incompatible with rapid publication for profit or with the popular priesthood.
Just as authors sought to differentiate their status from that of the “hacks,” their explorations of new definitions of books and authorship drew the boundaries between producers and consumers of print. Though the Enlighteners enthused over the public's increased access to books, their own interests dictated suspicion of popular consumers of print. The existence of this public audience indicated the success of Habsburg schooling reforms, yet authors disparaged the crowds of readers who consumed popular works as unsophisticated, with neither taste nor knowledge.Footnote 60 Lewenau, who preferred patronage, even questioned the assumption that publishing had inherent benefits, suggesting the common man could not be reasoned with.Footnote 61 When the production of knowledge was under the control of popular readers or clergy, increased ignorance, superstition, and frivolity at best or immorality at worst resulted for the masses. A standard of taste and hierarchy of ability solved these problems by placing responsibility for knowledge solidly in the hands of the intellectual class. Intellectuals thus defined themselves in relation to the rest of society through lingering paradigms of hierarchy and paternalism, for authors tasked themselves with elevating the minds and manners of the lower classes. Restricting authorship to intellectuals ideally ensured books would not be influenced by the whims or base tastes of the reading public.
One lengthy work from 1782 epitomized the tensions among Enlightenment ideals, traditional practices, and changing eighteenth-century realities. After asserting aptitude to arrive at truth was universal, its author argued philosophers had a duty to address the people as a whole and make ideas accessible to the less educated through language and form. Despite articulating this democratic view of knowledge, the author emphasized the importance of applying taste (the purview of the cultured). Sentiment, too, was required of an ideal author, for it claimed “A forthright heart is the first tool of truth, he who has felt nothing, knows not how to learn.”Footnote 62 Popularity itself became a sign of poor quality. Indicating the reasons for this author's anonymity, the work implied the quest for fame perverted. Rather than enthuse over the expansion of print and the emergence of popular writers, self-styled intellectuals expressed concern for the rapid proliferation of writers and writings. Broad societal concerns became intertwined with issues in the print market as Enlighteners searched for new means of limiting books and turned the title of author into an exclusive honorific. Part of the explanation for the discomfort with liberty in the press lay in the rigid social hierarchy of the eighteenth-century Habsburg world and intellectuals' contested place within it. One conservative work, titled Political Fragments, emitted a series of disgruntled aphorisms in response to new ideas and the direction of change. The anonymous author heaped scorn on the social pretensions of intellectuals with the straightforward “Learned class—Class? Phooey!”Footnote 63 This invective revealed writers sought (but failed to achieve) broad acknowledgement of their newly defined status in society. Aufklärer viewed themselves as set apart in abilities and their motivation to better society. Their discourse on publication restricted authorship to comparable ideological types and levels of ability. They thus used print to moderate the effects of press freedoms. Enlightenment-leaning intellectuals eagerly replaced state control of publication with arguments meant to educate and sway public opinion. Yet, the same authors who idealized freedom of thought quickly went on to pursue destructive practices in their attempts to control the press.
New Models of Knowledge Production and Consumption
The mobility and increased urban wealth that resulted from a nascent consumer society and other universal changes to the social structure in the eighteenth century created an atmosphere ripe for reconsiderations of hierarchy. The broader socioeconomic transition fueled discussions of virtuous, hard-working authorship and distinctions based on intellectual merit. Viennese authors sought to understand the effects of that transformation and the economic system of publication better to control books and guide the public in its consumption of print. The insecurities of rapidly modernizing cultural practices ensured writers' concern with questions of book consumption and profit from intellectual property. Those issues were directly related to the welfare of producers of books, but they were also connected to ideological desires. Ideally, Vienna would provide a self-sustaining market for the production of knowledge through a well-informed and pro-Enlightenment public. Through the public's consumption of good books, the city's knowledge producers would be locally supported while also gaining international prestige for themselves and their city.
To understand the economics of print and authors' role in society, writers crafted two comprehensive models for knowledge production. The first asserted that negative or low-quality print inhibited valuable, improving publications. The second believed, rather than inhibiting progress in knowledge, “bad books” still created readers, spread ideas, and stimulated thought which would eventually develop the public's taste and abilities. These opposing ways of understanding book production and dissemination divided the pro-Enlightenment writers in Vienna despite their united beliefs on the importance of a free press and a reading public. By describing the workings of the literary market and the effects of the proliferation of print on the public, authors presented their view of how Enlightenment would fail or succeed. Not content simply to describe their views of the functioning of publishing, these authors acted on their models of the print market; they manipulated publications and access to books with the goal of furthering Enlightenment.
Numerous works advanced the idea that the print market was finite. Despite the recent rapid expansion in the Broschürenflut belying that belief, surprising sources argued that the more poor-quality print and dilettante writers, the less Vienna's print culture could support Enlightenment progress. Popular writer Richter, under the heading for “book” in his satirical dictionary, wrote, “The ancients had few books and thought a lot. We have a lot of books and think little.”Footnote 64 Viennese writing was often satirical, yet the vehemence of some of the attacks on poor-quality pamphlets indicated a fear of losing control of ideas and their public reception.Footnote 65 To ensure success for their program then, Enlighteners saw manipulation of books behind the scenes and through the market as a legitimate and important endeavor befitting the learned class. They felt a decline in the numbers of lowbrow or conservative publications initiated a simultaneous increase in the consumption and therefore printing of improving literature. Conversely, every potential conservative tract was a threat to their program.
Depictions of this imagined embattled world of ideas and calls for directed cultural action brought responses from pro-Enlightenment writers, academics, and bureaucrats in Vienna. Some of the poets joined to produce a periodical explicitly to assert a stronger intellectual presence in the print market. The editors of this literary review, called the Realzeitung, hoped their journal would improve the nation's press and, by extension, its reputation abroad. Blumauer, one of the editors, also claimed that the Realzeitung would single-handedly expand the worldview of the Viennese through its criticism and display of taste.Footnote 66 One function of the review amounted to simple advertisement for the publishing industry—the editors sought to expose the Habsburg public to a wide variety of works. The literary review advertised and promoted its authors' own works and those of their fellow Enlightenment circle. But, in addition to informing the public of available books, reviewers sought to guide the reception of books by readers. Whether in language, form, or content, readers were taught how critically to read the wide variety of books newly available to the Viennese market. By claiming the authority of taste, reviewers sought definitively to establish common expectations for books. Realzeitung-approved publications furthered the preeminence of Enlightenment ideas, reformed religion, gathered scientific knowledge, and served the utility of the state and its people. The role of the review was thus essentially patriotic—it sought to make the reading public in Vienna more sophisticated, thereby stimulating improvements in its intellectual culture and publishing industry.
The Realzeitung also intended to regulate the press in Vienna. The editors united to attempt to ban works of no value from their presses and promote those that were worthy additions to the intellectual scene. A brief section of the weekly headed Makulatur (waste paper) was one tool adopted for the purpose of guiding readers' consumption of books. This section did not bother with reviews; simple presence on the list warned buyers of a title's lack of worth. The editors undoubtedly were naïve in their hope of controlling what the public desired to read. The list itself provided free advertisement and, it can be supposed, aroused curiosity or desire for the guilty pleasure of reading fluff. On the other hand, potential relegation to the Makulatur section became an insult to toss around in the pamphlet wars, as one of Johann Rautenstrauch's critics expressed a wish to see his works in that infamous section of the literary weekly.Footnote 67 Nevertheless, this step by the editors to control market forces by issuing a definitive what-not-to-buy list indicates they believed responsible spending among buyers would mend the problems of the Broschürenflut. Reflecting a similar thought process, the journal chastised the reading public for not buying works of value—as when a periodical deemed useful by the editors failed to succeed. Protectionism in the market of ideas prevailed among the reviewers of the Realzeitung because they perceived the market to be finite. Competition from the unworthy, less-than-noble pamphlet authors crowded the market and stifled the virtuous (Enlightened) press.
An international incident partially covered in the pages of the literary weekly revealed the extent to which this class of writers wanted the print market only to reward authorial virtue. The Berlin intellectual and prominent journal editor Friedrich Nicolai published a travelogue in the early 1780s that attacked Vienna's intellectual culture and new publishing spirit. For many of his former hosts, this was a betrayal. Blumauer in particular wrote incessantly on the travelogue. Deeming the typical channels of criticism and satire insufficient, Blumauer developed an innovative attack. In the Realzeitung, his “review” of the travelogue thoroughly summarized Nicolai's work to ensure reading the original was unnecessary. Half of the weekly literary review's pages were dedicated to this task in mid-1783. This ended after fifteen weeks, probably because the readers and other editors had enough, but Blumauer renewed his efforts in a separate publication. In this work, Blumauer introduced a second tactic for fiscal punishment by advertising a campaign to force Nicolai to return the subscription money to all 797 people who had signed up. Blumauer claimed Nicolai acted illegally by failing to deliver a useful and informative travelogue. In the lengthy title to this work, Blumauer pointedly refused to grant Nicolai the title of author, calling him instead a “Buchhändler” and suggesting he hoped to shame other such tradesmen from trying to become rich off the reading public through unethical publishing practices.Footnote 68 Though a ridiculous episode, the form Blumauer's attack on Nicolai took grew out of an atmosphere where the duties of an author and the concerns about profiting from books were highly charged topics. By accusing Nicolai of failing to fulfill authorial obligations and by endeavoring to deny him profit from an offensive work, Blumauer acted out the ambiguities of changing socioeconomic literary practice. The connection Blumauer articulated between monetary rewards and intellectual recognition reflected the contemporary complex interweaving of social and economic motivations and cultural ideals. Imbalance between social and monetary rewards and intellectual and cultural contributions profoundly disturbed those who wholeheartedly embraced the promise of press freedoms. Idealism was vulnerable to suspicious concerns that the market was irrational and unjust, particularly when people who opposed Enlightenment ideals made money from books.
The second, more permissive, theory of print contended even if the vast majority of pamphlet publications contained very little of intellectual or educational value, they still disseminated influences from the contemporary world of ideas. Recognizing Vienna was new to an active publishing culture and to popular Enlightenment, some argued that as writers inundated the public with words on paper, regardless of content, the public would become more informed than they had been before. The more the public read and became enthusiastic about pulp, the more they could be exposed to sophisticated arguments. As a result, these authors also emphasized a need to motivate intellectuals to produce more works of value, but they were less concerned about the existence of frivolous print. Thus Otto von Gemmingen, in the introduction to his moral weekly aimed toward the improvement of the upper classes, stated that he would not complain about the frivolity of the “Wiener Schriften” (as the pamphlets were called). He would not even call them unnecessary, for every author finds an audience. Though Gemmingen determined to act to publish a substantive and useful work for the improvement of an elite readership, he articulated similar ideas as historians today.Footnote 69 As Robert Darnton argued for the literary hacks of Paris, these “scribblers” served an important function in the simplification and dispersal of more complex ideas.Footnote 70 As hack authors poured out fashionable arguments for the eager public, Enlighteners argued, knowledge and criticism would worm their way to readers.
J. B. von Alxinger held views similar to Gemmingen's and even critiqued criticism itself for making intellectuals appear overly strident. He expressed disappointment in his friend Alois Blumauer's protectionism of the literary market and particularly his obsessive battle against Nicolai's travelogue. Alxinger believed intellectuals should better present themselves to try to earn a respected place in the public literary market. One pamphlet warned that, without the learned ranks of society creating a common front, the press would devolve into endless, inane chatter.Footnote 71 Published tracts and entries in journals exhorted the literary elite to pool their intellectual resources effectively to transform the publishing industry and achieve local progress and international respect. Other men of letters who believed in the benefits of proliferation were less concerned with self-presentation and more interested in contributing books that might better the reading public. Those self-identified intellectuals unconcerned about proliferation contributed imitations, plagiarism, and pirated editions. The Enlightenment-leaning literary youth of Vienna felt informed and formed by the poems and prose produced over the previous decades in London or Paris. They thus attached their names to translations and edited collections. Johann Pezzl flattered Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Mercier's Tableau of Paris by writing works about Vienna modeled on both. Ratschky popularized Rousseau and mid-eighteenth-century British poets. Others took imitation further. Rautenstrauch was accused of plagiarizing French and British writers, despite his rigorous attack on the publisher Wucherer for piracy. Their actions betrayed a belief that authors may borrow from other authors, and this practice flattered and helped to establish the fame of the original work. Publishers, however, could not steal works, for this practice impoverished authors. Such practices were not considered contradictory—the men of letters who made international contributions to criticism and knowledge accessible through imitation believed they were serving the reading public and improving society and the state.
The authors who actively reproduced material from other regions saw their activities as a useful contribution to the print market and for the readers, while those who saw the print market as finite tended to side more stringently with new ideas of intellectual property and a desire for originality. But the two sides did not disagree on everything. Both models for understanding the effects of a publishing market ensured Vienna's writers concerned themselves over the problem of bad books for they believed the changing literary market brought extensive social and economic ramifications. Whether worried about the effects of unedifying print on the populace or fearing for their city's status in the international republic of letters, these concerns led to a conviction of the need to take informed action and correct the flaws in the literary market.
Conclusion
The prolific self-identified “Enlighteners” had concerns beyond the developments in the literary market and its effects on readers, for they experienced real economic instability during this short era of change. Uncomfortable proximity between the “ten Kreuzer” authors and the “sharp-witted thinkers” emerged through the universal reliance on pamphlets and concerns over ownership and profit from ideas. Fears about the democratization of print by the very people who benefited from it reflected quite clearly the instability of an intellectual culture and socioeconomic sphere in transition. Though this time was unsettling to the people living through it, writers nonetheless found it a source of opportunity and hope. As a result, they left hundreds of works that contemplated the nature of print and authorship, the role of the intellectual in society, and the ways in which books affect a populace.
With the late development of an active intellectual culture in Vienna, books, readers, and publishing were of paramount interest to the coterie of literati. Their attempts to control the development of all three reflected their local desires to improve intellectual culture and their international aspirations for recognition. Enlighteners campaigned to limit the publication of frivolous or conservative works so that the public—consumers of print—would make good, self-improving choices in reading material. Restricting authorship and better controlling the public's economic power in the print market would, in their shortsighted view, move Vienna toward becoming a dominant capital of the republic of letters. Despite a sense of progress and newfound freedom in the early 1780s, some of the responses among Aufklärer to the changes in the literary market reverted to hierarchy, power, and suppression. Intellectuals felt proprietary toward press freedoms. If books truly were to be the signpost of Vienna's intellectual potential, frivolous works and the books produced by a conservative backlash to the Enlightenment were damaging. More had to be done in those instances than simply lament the direction of the press.
As stated in print, these elite authors' favored method of controlling publications was through advertising their personal (but authoritative) taste, thus putting a literary stamp of approval on a work. Interestingly, this piece-by-piece evaluation of works and the attempt to use economic and public means of control replicated the policies governments had devised to control the flow of ideas. The Habsburg regime long supported the piecemeal review of publication. The regime also turned to economic means of restricting readership—after a few years of watching the effects of the reforms he started his reign with, Joseph II responded to the excess flood of trivial publications by calling for financial punishment for works unsuited to publication. The developments in publications and the evolution of political ideas in pamphlet debates also brought forth a swift reinforcement of censorship by the late 1780s. But long before that occurred, the intellectuals most enthusiastic about press freedoms imitated the very methods the state used to limit the press. Despite the paradoxical nature of their actions and ideals, and despite the seeming regression to deference to power and censorship, modern authorship did emerge here. Enlightenment writers working in Vienna in the 1780s felt empowered to take over the state's role. They asserted for themselves, as a result of their taste and abilities, the right to control the knowledge made available to the reading public. They claimed for books, authors, and publishing houses the ability to transform society positively.
