Professor Éva H. Balázs has been at the centre of Hungarian historical scholarship for several decades. Commitment to her chosen topics, breadth of vision, profound knowledge of the sources, and her linguistic skills have justifiably assured her prominence in the profession. The book under review is, in her own words, "a distillation of forty years of researching, reading, and reflecting." (viii)

A sentence on the Empress/Queen Maria Theresa gives us a clue about what, in my opinion, is the greatest merit of her book. "Although Hungarian historians have been primarily interested in Maria Theresa as the queen of Hungary," Balázs wrote, "it should not be forgotten that she thought of herself first and foremost as sovereign of the Austrian hereditary lands." (p. 45) Indeed, while the book emphasizes the relationship between Hungary and the Habsburgs, this topic is rightly treated as part of a larger whole, as an important and at the same time interdependent link to other parts of the Habsburg realm, as well as to other countries within the framework of European international relations.

Balázs has done well in tracking down the German, French and Italian sources of the Enlightenment in Hungary, and she is instructive on how Freemasonry arrived in Central Europe. For Hungary, she correctly ties the Freemasons’ appeal primarily to the Protestants.

For them, membership in lodges somewhat diminished the adverse impact of official discrimination, which came to an end in 1781, when Joseph II’s Toleration Patent was issued.

This book presents excellent portraits of major figures in Vienna, including Maria Theresa herself, Count (later Prince) Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz and Count Karl von Zinzendorf, who had paramount influence on the governance of Hungary. These portraits are complemented by the author’s perceptive depiction of Joseph von Sonnenfels, the behind-the-scenes architect of Maria Theresa’s enlightened reforms.

Balázs is also effective in demolishing the old shibboleth in Hungarian historiography that reproaches the aristocrats, especially those who chose to live in Vienna, for becoming "denationalized courtiers." Balázs attempts to show, through the use of several examples, how these aristocrats did "pursue a distinctive brand of patriotism." (p. 104) Although her remark presents a welcome corrective, this is surely not an either/or proposition. It is hard to imagine how Hungarian aristocrats, living in Vienna, at close proximity to the Court and frequently marrying daughters from non-Hungarian aristocratic families, could have resisted the pressures of assimilation. What did emerge on occasion was a measure of self-identification with the nation. To call it Hungarian patriotism within the aristocratic context of the 18th century is however questionable.

Professor Balázs has interesting things to say about the Hungarian gentry, their geographical distribution in the country, vertical social mobility, litigiousness and economic difficulties, caused in part by Vienna’s mercantilist policies. Her discussions of towns and of Montesquieu’s influence in Hungary is likewise instructive.

The central focus of the book is, of course, Joseph II’s decade of rule between 1780 and 1790, which Balázs correctly characterizes as "the drama of the 1780s." Few rulers in world history are as fascinating as Joseph II, who wished to bend the entire population of a polyglot monarchy to his will. Convinced that he was the custodian of the welfare of his subjects, Joseph II was manifestly, even contemptuously, indifferent to what they thought or how they felt. While modest in his personal life, he was immodest in his quest for trying to realize unrealistic plans.

Balázs is very good in analyzing the Emperor’s various edicts and plans, and her characterizations of Joseph and Josephinism are excellent as well. "The blend of monomania and martial rigour" (p. 201) is an apt depiction, as is her conclusion: "The regime of this enlightened and fiercely absolutist sovereign was crippled by its own irreconcilable dichotomy." (p. 289)

Nevertheless, a curious paragraph attributes the Emperor’s downfall not to "internal tensions within his multinational monarchy," nor to the fact that "the regime was despotic in its enlightedness," but to the obsolescence of a "dynastically centred yet simultaneously enlightened government." (p. 146) This paragraph shifts causality to an abstract plane, which is anachronistic for the late 18th century. Then, republics were still isolated phenomena, most monarchies were not yet constitutional, and rulers still had a wide range of latitude. In fact, this view of Balázs’s lets Joseph II off the hook, denying the critical historical role of personalities that she otherwise affirms in the rest of her book. Certainly, a consistently enlightened absolutist regime was an unattainable ideal, but several contemporary and early 19th-century absolutist regimes—the German states of Baden, Prussia and Württemberg, even Russia, briefly, under Tsar Alexander I, and France, under First Consul Napoleon—displayed enlightened features.

As this issue demonstrates, Balázs sometimes prefers a strongly held view over available evidence. While in most instances she scrupulously adheres to meticulous research, she can become captive to her own biases. She reveals a tendency toward romantic idealism, which has characterized many works on Hungarian history. The 19th-century romantic idealization of the nation embodying putative permanent values and virtues has been replaced, mostly after 1945, by a romantic glorification of the Hungarian progressive tradition. Usually, a line is drawn from members of the 1794 Martinovics conspiracy through the radical democrats of 1848– 1849 to the so-called bourgeois radicals before the First World War, and their respective importance in each historical period is emphasized or implicitly assumed.

This is not to say that historians should subscribe to the needlessly belittling comments of C. A. Macartney, who described the Martinovics conspiracy as "an almost ludicrously childish affair of a few men," or to Gyula Szekfű’s mordant criticism of the two latter groups in his Három Nemzedék (1920). Rather, the forward-looking views of these radicals, as well as their personal integrity and courage, deserve respect. Still, T.C.W. Blanning’s view of the controversy about the Martinovics conspiracy also applies to the mid-19th and early 20th-century groups. "The attention paid to the episode," Blanning wrote, "certainly owes more to late twentieth- century politics than to late eighteenth- century reality."

As Marc Bloch observed, "knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself." Indeed, successive generations of historians view the past differently, often in ways which increase our historical understanding. Nevertheless, historians engaged in reinterpretation have an obligation to respect proportionality in the past, which means respecting the sense of what was more or less significant in the eyes of contemporaries, according to their own observations and values.

Professor Balázs pays no attention to the Martinovics conspiracy; she does something infinitely bolder. She has elevated the gentry to be the depository of progressive views. Naturally, she is too good a historian to believe that the entire class was progressive; she does speak of "retrograde factions" (p. 8), "of the feudal outlook of the nobility" (pp. 125–126), and of how members of the noble assembly in Szabolcs County were complaining in 1788 about the loss of their "ancient rights and liberties." (p. 269)

At the same time, she has made statements contrary to her own acknowledgements of the limitations of gentry involvement in reform, claiming that "the reformist nobility embraced much of the aristocrat, gentry, and petty gentry classes," (p. 142) and that the gentry began "to organize outside the traditional framework of counties in small groups that were pressing for regeneration." (p. 122)

The key to Balázs’ thinking rests on the assumption that resistance to Joseph II united the country’s progressive and retrograde factions, who in turn then developed a "genuine commitment to independent action and modernization replacing a policy that merely expressed the grievances of the Estates." (p. 8) This assumption, unfortunately, is a giant leap of faith based on wishful thinking, rather than on hard evidence.

All contemporary and later accounts of the gentry in Hungary stress their narrow provincialism, characterized by obsessive preoccupation with their homes, estates and amusements, hospitality to friends and relatives, and love of local politics in county assemblies, where they felt truly safe and at home. Balázs has built her case through selecting individuals from the gentry, such as Miklós Skerlecz and József Podmaniczky, who had displayed erudition and progressive views, and then exhorts the historian Domokos Kosáry "to widen his currently somewhat restricted definition of the Hungarian progressive camp." (p. 10)

However, neither Kosáry nor anyone else to my knowledge has ever denied the existence of few relatively outstanding individuals who came from the gentry. Even if diligent research would unearth a few more names, this would not validate Professor Balázs’ claims about widespread involvement of the gentry with modernization and regeneration.

The alliance between friends and foes of the Enlightenment against Joseph II was a purely tactical one which dissolved immediately upon his death. All instructions to delegates from the counties to the Diet of 1790–1791 contained a reference to "the ancient constitution under past attack", a clear-cut repudiation of Enlightenment ideas and practices. The delegates’ sole concession to the latter was the setting up of nine committees to explore the country’s problems. This was done, according to Marczali, because, while the delegates adhered to "the old," they could not completely shut themselves off from "the new." However, the archreactionary Emperor Francis I’s oppressive regime and the nobility’s aversion to any reform in the wake of the French revolutionary experiences put on hold any activities of these committees, let alone dissemination of new ideas and adoption of new solutions.

Éva Balázs registers her dissent, asserting that progressive political thinking continued and indeed formed a link during the intervening period between the reform movements of the 1780s and 1790s and the Age of Reform of the 1830s and 1840s. To Balázs, continuity is the most significant fact about this transitional period, and she again castigates Kosáry for giving insufficient weight to this fact. (p. 318)

This rather jaded controversy needs to be replaced by a more nuanced and balanced depiction of periods between eras of reform. History knows no vacuum, no period dies off without consequences and residues, and no new period is born without antecedents. Oppression was brutal in Hungary after the defeat of the 1848–1849 War of Liberation, but its memory survived and the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise was constructed of building blocks deriving from the agreement between Hungary and the Habsburg dynasty in 1848. Likewise, noble politicians during the Age of Reform built on the legacy of the 18th century and also the subsequent activities of mostly poets, writers and playwrights, who against heavy odds had championed modernity in Hungary in various ways and to various degrees.

Once again, Balázs bases her strong stand on the activities of a few individuals, including József Podmaniczky, Miklós Skerlecz and the Palatine, Archduke Joseph, that truly outstanding representative of the Josephinist tradition. However, for all the threads of continuity, the distinctiveness of any historical period in a given country should be measured not so much by what later became important concerns and themes as by the character of the government at the time and by the dominant mood of the intellectual elite, usually the most sensitive barometer to the tenor of the times. Although the government perpetuated the forms of Josephinism and even its content in church–state relations, its underlying substance became, in R. J. W. Evans’ words, "arid dynastic loyalism."

Among those who cared not just about their family and their county but also about the country of Hungary as a whole, the outlook on life was grim. Between the period of 1795 and 1815, no solutions for the country’s backwardness, provincialism and spiritual and intellectual stagnation seemed to appear on the horizon. The mood among the small elite was a sense of malaise. "I dread the future," the historian István Horvát wrote to János Ferenczy in 1809, "as we are just muddling through. It would be good if we could do something on our own.... that would be worthy of our nation but we are unfit to do it."

Of Balázs’s two principal heroes, Skerlecz died in 1799, and Podmanicky became a high county official and then a diplomat in Paris. When he returned to Hungary in 1818, he received the Grand Cross of the Leopold Order. He refused to accept it, saying that he would not need such an "empty ornament" among his serfs at Aszód. The threads of continuity were made up of such gestures and the activities of a small group of writers. However, the prime characteristics of the 1780s and 1790s were left behind, and what was coming in the 1830s and 1840s was a set of partially resurfacing but essentially new responses to new circumstances.

Although I would prefer that Professor Balázs reconsider the validity of some of her interpretations, she has written a valuable book, which should be read by specialists and all those who are interested in this fascinating period of Hungarian and Habsburg history.