Ágnes Deák
Meeting at the Crossroads of Liberalism and the Critique of Nationalism
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The historical philosophical framework of Eötvös's Dominant Ideas and Acton's essays of the early 1860s, (primarily "Nationality"), in which their nationality concepts appear, offer themselves for comparison. Identical points can be found in important aspects.
Both take as their points of departure the observation that individual liberty derives from Christian values and teaching and that modern political ideas originate in Christianity. Both view the development of European culture from a perceivably Catholic standpoint. Specialists in Acton's work agree that in the first period of his working life Catholicism was the most important motif in his theoretical and political activity. His intellectual development was strongly influenced by his teacher at Munich, Ignaz von Döllinger, an eminent German liberal Catholic theologian. In the early 1850s Acton spent some years in Döllinger's home, and contacts between them remained strong right up to the beginning of the 1870s. On his return from Germany around 1858, Acton immediately joined the editorial staff of the liberal Catholic journal The Rambler. Between 1859 and 1865 he was a Whig member of parliament, representing a Catholic constituency in Ireland. He regarded the spiritual and political authority of a strong, independent and universal Catholic Church as the direct and strongest safeguard of individual liberty. His writing in this period reveals a degree of tension between his liberal political views and the political interests of the Catholic Church, on which his thought focussed. Conflicts with the Church hierarchy and its embodiment, in the form of papal authority, developed only after 1864, when the encyclical Syllabus Errorum, in which the Pope condemned liberal Catholic views, was issued.
Christian ideas meant a source of inspiration and the safeguard of individual liberty for József Eötvös as well. In his appraisal of the role of Protestantism in history, he emphasized the strenghthening of the monarch's despotism, just as Lord Acton did. However, he did not tie his political and historical principles to the actual political interests of the Catholic Church, as Lord Acton did in the early 1860s.
Their views also tallied in assessing the spiritual and political trends of contemporary Europe. Both argued against feudal absolutism of the old type, as well as despotism of the new type as represented by Napoleon III in France in the 1850s, interpreting the latter as French liberal democratic ideas come true. In their view, Napoleon's rule carried to fulfilment the two principles that had existed earlier in French liberalism - the emphasis on values of equality as against values of liberty, and the principle of the omnipotence of the state against the individual. Acton and Eötvös both argued against the two types of absolutism and both idealized English liberal constitutionalism, which safeguarded individual liberty by limiting the authority of the state. They also added two more principles to that of limiting the power of the state; these were decentralized self-government bodies and cultural, religious and other forms of self-organization through associations, leagues and societies independent of the state.
In their appraisal of contemporary political relations in Europe, both held as a basic principle that the line of development led towards large states and that large states had features especially favourable to civilization.
Austria occupied a central place in both their thinking. This is not surprising in Eötvös's case, for liberalism in Hungary had from the very beginning unequivocally maintained that the Habsburg Empire guaranteed the defence of Hungarians, wedged between a Russia with territorial ambitions and the great cultural block of the Germans. Events of the 1848-49 Revolution and the subsequent Hungarian War of Independence shook this belief in the case of some of the leading liberals who, in their subsequent exile, sought other modes of safeguarding Hungary's place in Europe. Secessionism, however, did not really become dominant in Hungary.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, a period in which the power relations were being rearranged in Europe, Acton paid special attention to the problem of the Austrian Empire. Austria for him was a defender of Catholic interests, with a calling to lead a unified Germany and spread German culture among the less developed nations in Central and Eastern Europe. An enthusiastic supporter of German unification, Acton was an unequivocal partisan of Grossdeutsch ideas and Catholic Austria as opposed to Protestant Prussia.
Acton's attitude to Austria is crucial when interpreting his essay on nationalism. Direct political experience and goals are as much evident in his work as they are clearly outlined in Eötvös's, primarily in those parts of Dominant Ideas on the idea of nationalism inspired by specific political events and goals, the 1848 revolutionary movements in Europe and the political and intellectual incertitude that set in in their wake. Acton's essay "Nationality" was published in the first, July 1862, issue of Home and Foreign Review, the successor to The Rambler. From 1859 onwards, The Rambler had devoted attention to the events of the Franco-Austrian war and the ensuing domestic crisis in Austria. Lord Acton's library, (now in the Cambridge University Library) includes dozens of contemporary pamphlets printed in Austria at that time. His interest in Austria was most likely awakened by Ignaz von Döllinger, who already in August 1850, shortly after his arrival in Munich in July, took Acton to Austria with him. That journey was followed by several other visits. By the time Acton was involved with The Rambler, his interest in Austria resulted in a systematic examination of the political situation there. We know from his correspondence with Richard Simpson, a fellow Rambler editor, that he was already working on his essay "Nationality" when he wrote his articles on the political situation in Austria for the Current Events column of the review. It is hardly surprising then that his essay devotes several paragraphs to the country. His interest is further borne out by the autograph notes he made on the title page verso of a political pamphlet on Austria's domestic situation in his collection; these concern what was to become the basic idea of his essay, that nations constitute an obstacle to liberty as they interpret individual liberty as collective independence. Just as in the literature on Eötvös, some argue that he adjusted his policy too much to the interest of the preservation of the Habsburg Empire, so one critic of Acton's, Hugh Tulloch, also claims that his main motive in arguing against nationalism was the danger he thought it posed to the Catholic Church, and his preference for diversity as opposed to uniformity was nurtured by his admiration for the multi-lingual Austro-Hungarian Empire.4 These may be over-simplifications, yet it is beyond doubt that the restoration of Austria's great power status, a rejuvenation of the Empire's structure and the constitutional transformation of its neo-absolutism were challenges and goals for both thinkers, and all the above can be traced in their political philosophy.
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[...] An examination of Acton's bequest in the Cambridge Univerity Library brings up clear evidence that we are not dealing here with a mere parallel in the history of ideas, as the result of a sensitivity towards similar contemporary problems. The surprising and hitherto unknown fact is that Acton had read Eötvös's Dominant Ideas and that, together with other thinkers and their works, it contributed to the shaping of his views.
No evidence of any personal encounter between them is available, even though spatially or temporarily it cannot be excluded. Acton arrived in Döllinger's home in Munich in July 1850; Eötvös spent the winter of 1849-50 in Munich and in the summer of 1850 until December 1850 he lived in Tutzing, an hour from Munich by train. Nor have we any knowledge of contacts between Eötvös and Döllinger. Indeed, Eötvös said in a letter to Menyhért Lónyay dated 2 October 1866, that since Johann Kaspar Bluntschli had moved to Heidelberg and Guido Görres had died he knew no-one at the University of Munich, nor did he correspond with anyone.13 We can nevertheless safely assume that it was Döllinger who directed Acton's attention to Dominant Ideas. Acton became a passionate collector of books and the two-volume German edition of Dominant Ideas is there in his library, alongside a number of other works on Austria and Hungary.14
Acton's notes are evidence that he had read Eötvös's work and did not merely own it. From the late 1850s, Eötvös's name appears in his notebooks several times under the headings of federalism, national character and problems of nationality - unfortunately without any explication. In a list of articles planned for publication, not necessarily to be written by himself, that has come down from the time he was associated with The Rambler, we find the following note: "Hungary, political or literary. Eötvös."15 (No essay on the subject was eventually published in the review.) The pencil marks Acton made in the pages of his books are also revealing as to what he was most interested in (he rarely wrote any notes in the margin). In the contents page of the first volume of Eötvös's work, for instance, pencil marks appear solely at Chapters 3, 5 and 7, the three chapters in which issues of nationality are discussed. In the first volume, the pencil marks appear in the text itself only in the first eight chapters, in the second volume some marks are found only in the last chapter, a summary.
Gyõzõ Concha, who has made a painstaking survey of the reception of Dominant Ideas abroad, comments that very little is known of an echo in Britain. This is true even though an English translation of Eötvös's novel A falu jegyzõje (The Village Notary), thanks to Ferenc Pulszky's good services, appeared as early as 1850, as Lóránt Czigány's study on the reception of Hungarian literature in Victorian England points out.16 Thus Eötvös was not totally unknown to educated readers in Britain. Nevertheless, language difficulties and the still perceivable anti-Catholic sentiment in Britain provide ample explanation for the lack of response to Dominant Ideas. A short account of it appeared in The Westminster Review in 1855.17 Acton also expressed his appreciation in the September 1861 issue of The Rambler in an article entitled "Austria and Hungary" which, though unsigned, was almost certainly by him. In this he writes: "His work on the 'Influence of prevailing ideas on the state' is the best existing confutation of the theories of democratic Liberalism, and an excellent defence of the principle of the limitation of authority."18 Acton introduced Eötvös and Ferenc Deák to English readers as conservative politicians with sincere Catholic convictions, whose political views are based on historical law and whose characters and abilities match those of any statesmen of their time. Of the thoughts in Dominant Ideas, he singled out the critique of the sovereignty of the majority and the omni- potence of the state, in opposition to which Eötvös professed the autonomy of moral entities, among which he included nations. In this way, says Acton, the rights, and liberty of all nations become, similarly to individual rights, factors limitating the authority of the state.
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Ágnes Deák
teaches 19th-century Hungarian history at the József Attila University, Szeged. Her research centres on the history of ideas in the 19th century.
