Steamboats cannot stand the smell of feudalism”,1 wrote Count István Széchenyi in his diary on August 1st, 1830. On that day Széchenyi had observed a team of sweating labourers hauling a boat round one of the infamous Danube “reaches”, men who were treated little better than the “half-wild” horses often employed for the same job. A large number of haulers was required, but labour was cheap: the muscle-power was recompensed with the equivalent of a few pence a day, or no wage at all if conditions were too bad to proceed. One year later, the first steamship (with engines supplied by Messrs Boulton & Watt) was put into service on the Danube—doubtless the same boat, with its morose and supercilious English captain, on which one Michael Joseph Quin was to travel in 1835.2 Quin not only gives a vivid description of steam travel in its infancy, but also notes that the Hungarian Diet, after long deliberation, had just passed a resolution instituting a toll for the projected bridge between Pest and Buda. “Slight as this incident may seem to an Englishman,” he remarks rather self-righteously, “it will probably lead the way to many useful reforms (in Hungary), on account of the principle of equal taxation which it involves”. The new possibilities of progress down and progress across the Danube were, as Quin accurately perceived, harbingers of something far greater than mere convenience of movement: they heralded the protracted birth of a civil society that was also to be a national rebirth.
Confronting industrialization
Széchenyi, for his part, instinctively
realized that steam power, with its enormous potential for increasing production
and mobility, both symbolized and embodied the nexus between economic progress
and social transformation. England itself stood on the threshold of the
railway age, which was also to be the age of the Great Reform Bill. The
poet William Wordsworth, by this stage of his life a romantic reactionary,
disapproved of both: of railways because they encouraged an unreflective
rushing about which was decivilizing, and of the Reform Bill because he
thought it weakened a time-honoured framework of social cohesion and opened
the way to demagoguery. Over thirty years later, the novelist William Thackeray
ironically looked back on the coming of the railway, writing in the Cornhill
Magazine: “We are of the time of chivalry as well as the Black Prince…
we are of the age of steam. We have stepped out of the old world on to
Brunel’s vast deck, and across the waters ingens patet telius. Towards
what new continent are we wending? To what new laws, new manners, new politics,
vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised… We who
lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world are like Father
Noah and his family out of the ark.”3 These perceptions, albeit jocularly
expressed, were also an intimation of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter
was later to describe as the “creative destruction” inherent in the new
order of rampant capitalism, a force to which few corners of Europe were
to remain invulnerable.
As Széchenyi well knew, modernization
and what we now refer to as “technology transfer” had enormous—and not
always happy—implications for its beneficiaries. Above all, it had implications
for the old order of society, as Samuel Smiles, that complacent apologist
for progress and bourgeois values, made clear in his life of the railway
engineer, George Stephenson. ”It was some time,” he wrote drily, “…before
the more opulent classes, who could afford to post to town in aristocratic
style, became reconciled to railway travelling. The old families did not
relish the idea of being conveyed in a train of passengers of all ranks
and conditions, in which the shopkeeper and the peasant were carried along
at the same speed as the duke and the baron—the only difference being in
price. It was another deplorable illustration of the levelling tendencies
of the age.”4 Such attitudes may have been typical of a reactionary British
élite, but it is interesting to see the specifically Magyar spin
put on them by a visiting Hungarian, Ferenc Pulszky, as he contemplated
the democratic fall-out (and financial excesses) of the first railway boom
on his visit to England in 1836. In his diary he wrote of his fears that
“the age of the railway may also become the age of superficiality, and
that instead of love of the fatherland, there will be a levelling cosmopolitanism.”
He found much to admire in Britain—more than he expected, given the preconceptions
with which he arrived, fully expecting to be confronted with a land where
“utilitarianism rules”, one far too like America, which he calls “the fatherland
of egoism… a republic on Bentham’s model where the spirit is oppressed,
life loses its greatest charm, its shining colours, and everything ends
in surfeit.” While he admires London (but chiefly because of its green
parks with cattle grazing in them), Manchester is “wreathed in thick factory
smoke, like a city on fire, the sparsely windowed houses depressing, anything
more noble extinguished by the oppression of the steam machines”; in the
city’s spinning factories, these machines “all but made workmen dispensable.”5
This is the sceptical spirit to be found also in the attitudes of Lajos
Kossuth, and powerfully expressed in his speech to the new Hungarian Parliament
in February 1848: Hungary, he says (quoting Isaac Newton), should “emulate
the dwarf that grows taller and sees further than the giant himself on
whose shoulder he has climbed … our nation—though backward—may profit from
the experiences of other nations; let us avoid following them in everything,
and endeavour to avoid their mistakes.”6
In Britain, concern about the social consequences
of the industrial revolution were expressed both on the left and the right
of politics (by the Chartists on behalf of the exploited workers, by a
conservative radical like William Cobbett who lamented the despoliation
of England, the growth of cities at the expense of the countryside and
the materialistic greed of the new rich).
Likewise in feudal Hungary, the obiter
dicta of the two towering figures in the politics of the Reform Age, Count
István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth, demonstrate the extent
to which both were aware of the social costs involved in the modernization
process. In particular they were sensitive to the obliteration of the personal
ties characteristic of feudalism and their substitution by the anonymity
and anomie engendered by systems of greater economic efficiency. After
all, children working down the mines was hardly a humanitarian improvement
on the feudal exploitation of labourers. Nevertheless, there are clear
distinctions in the attitudes of the two men, distinctions that ultimately
led not only to them proposing markedly different solutions to Hungary’s
problems, but also to an irreversible personal split between them, which
highlighted the historically grounded dilemma in which Hungary found itself
at this time.
When Széchenyi visited England for
the first time in 1815, his letters to Count Zichy brimmed with enthusiasm
for new technologies. “He visited workshops and factories,” writes his
biographer, George Barany, “and was fascinated by steam engines, gas pipelines,
sawmills, sausage-cutting gadgets and the ‘extraordinary’ sight of forty
workers producing 500 pairs of shoes a day.” Yet almost in the same breath
he remarks somewhat naively that steam power could not compete with cheap
labour in backward countries like Hungary, and that Hungarians were a “warlike
nation… of innate ferocity, unlikely to adjust to a spinning mill”, going
on to “thank God there are no factories in Hungary”.7 Thirty-seven years
later, Imre Madách wrote a scene for his Tragedy of Man in which
Adam is likewise bowled over by the liberty and energy-releasing dynamism
of London’s capitalist society:
No more taboos, restrictions, segregation,
no gruesome phantoms stalking from the
past
to be enshrined and glorified by custom
the curse and plague of future generations
—only to be abruptly disillusioned by its downside (“no competition where their rules are crooked”, “no independence where the hungry millions / must bend to someone’s yoke to keep alive”).8
Differing perspectives on reform
Ironically it was the Catholic Széchenyi
who was later to change his view to a positive one about the necessity
of efficient manufacturing, although his aristocratic attitudes retained
a strong colouring of religious humanitarianism. His great projects grew
from the mind of a visionary romantic and apostle of national aspiration,
yet they were firmly grounded in utilitarian logic. In the views of the
Lutheran Kossuth, who is rightly regarded as Hungary‘s first professional
politician, a narrower focus of political calculation may be discerned:
certainly he espoused a radical, egalitarian agenda for modernization and
embourgeoisement; but the agenda was skewed towards the interests of the
lesser nobility from which he came, the chief upholders of the autonomous
county system. These differences in outlook led to a significantly differentiated
reception of ideas that originated in the French, British and American
Enlightenments. Széchenyi, for example, remained a steadfast protagonist
of free trade, while Kossuth (under the influence of the ideas of Friedrich
List) argued for protectionism (or at least a defensive tariff zone) and
indeed set up a Protective Industrial Union. Then again, Széchenyi
(in common with the liberals Baron Eötvös and Ferenc Deák)
saw the absolute requirement of a strong centralized administration (in
the British context indicated by the auto-nomy and legislative monopoly
of the national parliament), if his country was to be successfully modernized;
but Kossuth still saw the political milieu of the venerable counties in
which he had been nurtured as the core of democracy and national identity.
Often he seemed to gloss over the fact that they could also be the bulwark
of anachronistic privilege, hostile to any change that did not enhance
the
interests of the gentry. Lastly, Széchenyi,
a child of the Enlightenment in so many respects, believed in the leading
role of the aristocracy (who should be far-sighted and virtuous men, rather
like Plato’s philosopher kings), even in a state where feudalism had been
dismantled. The populist Kossuth, on the other hand, was a man whose appeal
was increasingly shaped by a mass audience, just as he also aspired to
articulate the will of the masses. It was this very gift that could be
fatal to him, leading eventually to disastrous miscalculations on the nationality
issue; here, Széchenyi displayed greater insight and vision in his
articulation of the problem, notwithstanding a certain ambivalence in his
attitude to Jews. The great Austrian dramatist of the 19th cen-tury, Franz
Grillparzer, movingly articulated the sacred mission of a dynasty; Széchenyi,
by contrast, believed in the sacred mission of individual nations, but
not that these missions should be mutually exclusive. Indeed, he shared
Grillparzer’s anxiety (which proved to be well-founded) about mankind’s
ever-imminent fall from grace through nationalism, whereby esteem of one’s
own national culture is maintained chiefly by fear and hatred of others—as
Grillparzer puts it, the descent “von der Humanität durch die Nazionalität
zur Bestialität”.
Most of the issues on which Széchenyi
and Kossuth differed are fundamental to the history of Britain and Europe
in the 19th century, even if the way in which they were argued was determined
by the particular national context. Hungarian intellectuals and political
activists watched closely to see how the political establishment of Victorian
Britain dealt with the free trade issue, or responded to pressure from
middle-class commercial interests for more say in government, or failed
to respond to the demands of the working man formulated by the Chartists,
or even more lamentably failed to free itself from its Protestant, imperialistic
Weltanschauung when dealing with Ireland. (Baron Eötvös, for
instance, even published a long essay on Poverty in Ireland in 1840). However,
the lively interest in Britain, what conservative opponents of reform in
Hungary disparagingly dubbed “Anglomania”, had its roots further back in
the spread of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and in particular
in the dissemination of ideas mediated by freemasonry. A brief survey of
this phenomenon may help to illuminate why reformers in a Catholic-dominated,
agrarian, land-locked country, that was subordinate to a foreign dynasty,
believed that the experience of an aggressively expanding maritime power
with fast developing industrialization and a strong bourgeois layer, a
state moreover founded on Protestant supremacy, was (or should be) relevant
to their own country.
The Enlightenment and Freemasonry
In the late 18th century travel abroad for
Hungarians was a privilege of the nobility, although they might carry a
train of retainers with them, as did Ferenc Széchényi (father
of István), who travelled to England in 1787 with his wife, his
Hungarian secretary, his Swiss doctor and two servants.9 Even the nobility,
however, had to negotiate a passport with the Vienna court, not always
easy in the climate of official paranoia which increased to fever pitch
following the French Revolution in 1789 and a subsequent failed Jacobin
conspiracy in Hungary (1794). Both the American and French revolutions
had a powerful impact on the élite of Hungary, while the ideas brought
into circulation by the thinkers of the French Enlightenment (most notably
Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois) not only influenced Habsburg rulers
like Joseph II and his sucessor, Leopold II, but also contributed to the
admiration for England and its supposed preservation of ancient freedoms
somewhat rhapsodically described by the great French thinker.
One of the most agreeable aspects of Montesquieu’s
writing was his openness to other civilizations and the lessons they might
have for one’s own, a tendency ridiculed by that pillar of English conservatism,
Dr Johnson. (“Whenever Montesquieu wants to support a strange opinion,”
wrote the coffee-house sage, “he quotes you the practice of Japan or of
some other distant country. To support polygamy he tells you of the island
of Formosa, where there are ten women born for one man.”)10 A major feature
of the Enlightenment, therefore, was the tendency to look for hints, if
not role models, in societies previously considered as threatening rivals
(or, if non-Christian, as barbarous). It was in this spirit that Hungarian
intellectuals looked inter alia to England, just as Anglo-Scottish intellectuals,
such as Adam Smith or David Hume, drew inspiration from France. Montesquieu’s
empirical respect for other cultures was transmuted in the Romantic era,
most conspicuously in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, into an almost
mystical notion of the sacred mission of individual cultures (assuming
they were strong enough to survive), and there is a great deal of Herder‘s
attitudes (in a positive sense) in the thinking of Count Széchenyi.
The sorry history of nineteenth century nationalism should not be adduced
to degrade the dignified love of country that Széchenyi typically
exhibited, a love which assumed that the homeland could be subject to improvement
by studying the experience of others. The charge of “Anglomania”, levelled
against him, was particularly absurd insofar as he was critical of many
things in England (referring perceptively to a strain of “intolerance”
underlying the mask of liberal thought) and (in common with Kossuth) specifically
stated that each country should only take from another what was suitable
for local circumstances.
If these factors are borne in mind, it
becomes easier to understand the socially conservative, yet (by the standards
of the day) politically liberal stance of many reform-minded Hungarian
nobles and some of the county officials (honoratiores), who equated their
own interests with those of the nation. They did so quite naturally, since
they were indeed, in a quasi-constitutional and legal sense, the natio
Hungarica, insofar as that had been fixed in stone by the famous Tripartitum
drawn up by István Werboýczy. Published in 1517, three years
after the bloody suppression of the great peasant revolt led by György
Dózsa, Werboýczy‘s legal code had notoriously delivered the
Hungarian peasants into perpetual serfdom. On the other hand, the point
has been well made that many of those from the middling and lesser nobility
who were to espouse reform in the 1830‘s were the very people who, on paper
at least, stood to lose most by peasant liberation and tax reform: the
magnates had enough assets to adapt to anything the new dispensation was
likely to demand of them, but the lesser nobles lacked capital to hire
labour and invest. It may be that poverty-stricken privilege within a society
where the majority of the population was oppressed by the law, while a
small minority enjoyed virtual legal immunity, had by then become an embarrassment
to them.
Whether or not that was really the case,
it is clear that the influence of speculative freemasonry, which had spread
from England to the continent in the early and mid-18th century, had provided
the impetus for the reconsideration of some of the most treasured assumptions
about the Hungarian constitution and about governance in general. A large
number of intellectual Hungarian aristocrats had become adherents of freemasonry,
including such leading figures as Draskovich, Erdoýdy, Festetics,
Batthyány, Podmaniczky, Csáky and even Széchenyi‘s
ultra-loyal father as a young man. Like his son, he found himself torn
between loyalty to the Emperor (although he resigned all his official posts
in 1786, when Joseph II began consistently to ignore the constitution)
and his Hungarian patriotism.11 The Masonic Constitutional System of Liberty,
drawn up by Draskovich in the 1770‘s and heavily influenced by the ideas
of Montesquieu, seems to have won his complete approval.
The British Grand Lodge, founded in 1717,
approved and strongly influenced continental lodges until the Berlin one
was set up in 1740, possibly as a device of Frederick the Great to gain
influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, as Margaret Jacob
has pointed out, German freemasons in the 1780‘s still identified “our
freedom [as] the tradition of the British nation”, a tradition which “embodied
British cultural values associated with the potentially subversive religious
toleration, relaxed fraternizing among men of mixed and widely disparate
social backgrounds, an ideology of works and merit, and not least of constitution
and elections.”12 This somewhat romanticized picture (the bitter struggle
for Catholic emancipation in Ireland gives a truer picture of British “religious
tolerance”) nevertheless illustrated how deep the rosy picture of the English
polity painted by Montesquieu had sunk into the consciousness of continental
Europe. It is perhaps in the context of these attributes, or supposed attributes,
that a leading mason, József Podmaniczky, (according to a secret
police report) secretly offered the Hungarian throne to an English duke
in 1788, if the Habsburgs could be successfully toppled. (It ought to be
said, however, that offering the Hungarian throne around was then in fashion:
Louis Philippe d‘Orléans, a possible ruler of a projected independent
Austrian Netherlands, had also been considered, as was Duke Karl August
of Weimar. The latter was tempted to accept, until a magisterial blast
from Goethe put him back on the straight and narrow).13
The disillusion of the multi-talented József
Podmaniczky with Emperor Joseph II, under whom he had made a glittering
career as a Lutheran from the gentry class promoted to a baronetcy in the
hope of winning over potentially troublesome elements, was doubtless sealed,
if not determined, by Joseph’s Freemasonry Patent of 1785. This subjected
the free-thinking masons to central, indeed to police supervision. Joseph
(who had once been suspected of being a mason himself, his father Franz
Stefan of Lorraine, having been initiated in 1733 at the English ambassador‘s
residence at The Hague) thereby destroyed much of the good will engendered
by his enlightened Tolerance Patent of 1781. This had extended religious
tolerance to Protestants, fomerly banned from the imperial civil service
under the terms of the Carolina Resolutio. Since about a third of the Hungarians
were Protestant, it comes as no surprise to find that there was also a
Protestant preponderance in Hungarian freemasonry in the 1770‘s and 1780‘s;
of the one thousand or so members of Hungarian lodges, three-quarters were
landed gentry, for the most part either Lutheran or Calvinist.14 As George
Barany points out, Protestantism actually came to be identified with the
very notion of reform, insofar as Catholic conservatives were to refer
to the “Reform Party” and the “Protestant Party” interchangeably, when
commenting on the proceedings of the Lower Diet between 1832 and 1836.15
Notwithstanding this clear connection with
Protestantism, caution should be exercised about attributing too much direct
British influence on Hungarian lodges. Religious tolerance was an issue
fundamental to continental masonry, yet only lip service was paid to it
in the English lodges, whose members came from the hegemonical Protestant
majority of the political establishment and did not bestir themselves on
behalf of Catholic or Jewish emancipation. Theirs was a very different
perspective from that of a Hungarian Protestant, who was part of an officially
mistrusted minority—which probably explains why the Draskovich Observance
mentioned above followed so closely the spirit of De L‘Esprit des Lois.
However, English freemasonry did have other indirect effects, both by making
issues in political economy and even commerce, a less alien topic for the
social élite in Hungary, and by exerting an emblematic aesthetic
influence, for example in the aristocratic cult of parks and gardens. Géza
Hajós has made some suggestive remarks about Viennese gardens (including
one laid out by the Esterházys) and the way in which their symbolic
architecture and libertarian English design may be linked to freemasonry.16
In Pest, the first park to which the public had (albeit limited) access
was laid out in 1799 in the English style by László Orczy,
a member of the First Innocence Lodge; subsequently both the Palatine‘s
park on the Margaret Island and the City Park showed strong English influence,
particularly in the planting of different species of trees from many lands
and the design of meandering paths that allowed the private experience
of unspoiled nature in a romantic setting. Elsewhere (at Hédervár,
Tata, Csákvár, Martonvásár and Kismarton) formal
Baroque gardens were replanted in the English style with the help of gardeners
who had studied their craft in England, or entirely new English gardens
were laid out.
The stress on the individual‘s right to
his private experience of the garden (and perhaps to meditate in the garden‘s
masonic shrines) was a departure from the regimentation and rhetorical
display of Baroque garden design, which also made little allowance for
private space. However, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact
that in England itself the great landscaped parks were still for the most
part an assertion of the landocracy‘s rights of ownership, on which hoi
polloi had no rights at all. Exceptional were the great royal parks of
London (Hyde Park, St James Park, Green Park) that had once been Henry
VIII‘s hunting grounds, and whose opening to the public in the 17th century
was emblematic of a more contractual basis for the relationship between
monarch and people. Yet, one hundred and fifty years later, John Nash‘s
speculative development of Regents Park was initially conceived as a manifestation
of the property-based liberties of the prosperous middle and upper middle
classes, the whole spirit of which (as for the nobility) elevated individual
rights by maintaining exclusion and exclusiveness. The park was not in
fact opened to the public until 1838, which was ten years after its completion,
and Nash himself had said he wanted to create the illusion that each villa
overlooked its own park: with no other villa in sight it would seem as
if “the entire park belonged to it.”17 This was the English version of
what Adolf Loos attacked as in-supportable pretension in Ornament und Verbrechen,
contemptuously dismissing “his Majesty the Plebs”, who lived in a modest
dwelling concealed behind the façade of a palace. Still, the English
bourgeoisie may have seen it differently—as a laudable aspiration to the
aristocrat‘s perception of his property, a levelling up of society rather
than the levelling down to mediocrity which cultural pessimists (and also
liberals like Ferenc Pulszky) were ready to denounce.
From enlightened abstraction to practical measures
The origins of freemasonry lay in mastery
of the geometrician‘s complex skills, a mastery that naturally developed
into monopolization of knowledge (a commercial weapon) and the control
of initiation (leading to the formation of an artisan, later an intellectual,
élite). However, the original criteria of craftsmen‘s skills, and
then of more general intellectual ability in the period of the Enlightenment,
gave masonry its meritocratic tinge, while also suggesting an alliance
between the empiricism of 18th-century scientific inquiry and a progressive
Weltanschauung. Moreover, Newton‘s discovery of the laws of gravitation
at the end of the 17th century suggested to thinkers of the Enlightenment
that universal laws might also be discovered to apply in the social world
of man, specifically in methods of governance and economic behaviour. Jeremy
Bentham‘s utilitarian philosophy (in which the Széchenyis, father
and son, were well versed, while Kossuth was to read his works when imprisoned
for reporting the proceedings of the County Administrations from 1837)
represented an attempt to regulate societies according to how men are,
not how they ought to be in the light of some abstract moral or religious
precept. The same could be said of Adam Smith‘s more sophisticated account
of the unintended benefits of the pursuit of economic self-interest. Both
thinkers preferred the concept of improvement to that of perfectibility
and both assumed that progress could actually be achieved by the adoption
of certain modes of behaviour and the avoidance of others. Not only did
this imply a complete liberation from the static and still, in many ways,
medieval view of the world that prevailed under Hungarian feudalism, it
also suggested a willingness to take calculated risks, to invest for long-term
results and to adopt many other features of bourgeois capitalism. There
are innumerable remarks by Széchenyi that suggest the influence
of this way of thinking in general and of Bentham or Smith in particular,
but one example from his book on credit will suffice, where he states that
“not fertile plains, mountains, minerals, climate and so forth make up
the public force, but the mind that can utilize these. The real power of
the nation is revealed in the number of educated heads....”18
However, the rewards of sophisticated commerce
and industrialization that Britain was beginning to enjoy would not have
been possible without the wealth generated by the preceding revolution
in agriculture. The young Széchenyi had perhaps been more percipient
than he knew when he opined that a backward country like Hungary should
not make a dash for industrialization, but concentrate on improving the
productivity of agriculture, since an accumulated agricultural surplus
was indeed the base and sine qua non of Britain reaching what economic
theorists describe as the “take-off point” for economic growth. Some reforming
Hungarian nobles, and more especially their factors, were fascinated by
the ideas of English agronomists such as Arthur Young and Jethro Tull,
but were hampered in their efforts to employ the new methods in agriculture,
partly by differences in soil and climate, but more often by the feudal
system. Whereas in Britain an entire class of capitalist tenant farmers
had grown up, Hungarian serfs were still paying tithes and performing socage.
Leases were unstable because of the notorious and ubiquitous entailment
of properties, but worse than all this—as Széchenyi protested in
his polemic entitled Hitel (Credit)—was the
virtual absence of credit on reasonable
terms, which prevented long-term investment and modernization. Raising
the necessary mortgage to improve the land was almost always ruinous, since
potential lenders knew that the aviticity law (oýsiség),
whereby land was entailed to the landowner and his successors in perpetuity,
effectively prevented the distraint of property offered as collateral security.
Széchenyi himself, although a wealthy
landowner, was refused credit by a Viennese bank shortly after the occurrence
of one of the most notorious Hungarian financial scandals involving the
powerful Count Grassalkovich, whose agents induced Viennese savers to invest
in interest-bearing bonds in 1825 to raise two million forints on the collateral
of the Grassalkovich estates. Given the bad
reputation of Hungarian loans, special
prospectuses were issued purporting to offer guarantees of repayment and
interest and a Viennese bank underwrote the offer. Specifically, the Count
undertook to forego the protection of Hungarian feudal law in case of dispute
and to make himself accountable to an Austrian court. These assurances
proved to be worthless. When the interest ceased after a couple of years,
creditors found that the Viennese bank washed its hands of the matter;
although a Viennese court found in their favour, Count Grassalkovich blandly
invoked Hungarian law to refuse payment and was backed by the County. The
latter even issued a judgement condemning the usurious practices of his
creditors.19 If this sort of behaviour was possible by one of the leading
families of the land, one could be forgiven for thinking that many nobles
were simply drones who dressed up their parasitic crookery in legal niceties
and the rhetoric of patriotism. Although the Grassalkovich case was probably
exceptional, it lends force to Széchenyi‘s heartfelt writings on
the necessity of a ius cambio-mercantile, a mercantile code that would
make commercial undertakings binding on participants. The usurious rates
of interest of which Hungarian nobles self-righteously complained (e.g.
Count Carl Andrásssy in Umrisse einer möglichen Reform in Ungarn—1833)
were of course primarily the consequence of the high risk attached to dealing
with a layer of society that had formed the law in its own image. Széchenyi‘s
thinking reflects the insistence of Adam Smith that enlightened self-interest
had come “to respect property rights and to regard the keeping of contractual
promises as ‘reasonable expectations’... As commerce increased, there was
a greater social need for honouring contractual promises, and a greater
sense of disappointment felt by those subjected to broken promises. Contract
law was a response to that need.”20
Apart from the above considerations, Hungarian
agricultural reformers were hampered by the imperial revenue system which
required the maintenance of mass peasant holdings on which the taxes were
raised from which the nobility were exempt. The liberation of what nobles
contemptuously called the misera plebs contribuens, and the spreading of
the taxation burden, were items high on Széchenyi‘s agenda, and
by the same token, the insistence that nobles should pay the toll on the
projected Chain Bridge between Buda and Pest was of immense symbolic importance
as representing an irreversible step in the direction of a civil society.
Significantly, it was the Lord Chief Justice who burst out weeping when
the institution of a toll was agreed by the Diet in 1835, correctly—from
his point of view—forecasting that it would lead to the downfall of the
Hungarian nobility and proclaiming that he would himself never cross the
bridge as long as he lived. Nothing illustrates better than his reaction
the point made by Bentham and Smith that laws generally reflected the interests
of those who framed them, and all too often therefore offered a refuge
for those who wished to circumvent natural justice. The lesser Hungarian
nobility were indeed obsessed with law, and in the 1840‘s it was the proud
boast of Pest “to possess more lawyers than Bohemia, Styria and Dalmatia
combined.”21
If the feudal law was an obstacle to land
transfer and innovation in agriculture, there was still the possibility
of practical measures. In this respect the founding of the Georgikon in
1797 on the Keszthely estate of Széchenyi‘s uncle, Count György
Festetics, was of considerable significance. Here a new spirit was evident,
to counter the wasteful “slash and burn” mentality of traditional feudal
agriculture, which had only been encouraged by the fact that Hungary was
relatively rich in cultivable land per head of the population, and that
under the one hundred and forty years of Turkish occupation much land (with
no peasantry to work it) had been left to “rest”. This apparent blessing
was now also a spur to inefficiency, for if one strip was exhausted, it
was often simply abandoned and an unworked one brought into cultivation.
Inefficient cultivation meant that yields were low under the feudal system.
The English agronomist, Arthur Young, spoke of producing 22 hectolitres
of corn per hectare (2.471 acres) in 1770 on the best land in Britain,
while the peasant farming of France was estimated to produce only 16 hl/ha;
some thirty years later Germany with Central Europe were still said to
be producing only some 10-11 hl/ha.
The English methods for increasing productivity
were mediated by German writers: in particular, Albrecht Thaer‘s Einleitung
zur Kenntnis der englischen Landwirtschaft (1798–1800) was influential
(and sometimes misleading), while a Hungarian writer, Ludovicus Mitterpacker,
was clearly drawing on a German translation of Arthur Young‘s Six Months
Tour in the Northern Provinces of England in his Elementa rei rusticae
in usum academiarum Regni Hungariae (Buda, 1777–1794). The first Principal
of the Georgikon agronomic academy, János Nagyváthy, took
many of his ideas from Mitterpacker, but later attributed the agricultural
slump after the Napoleonic Wars to the introduction of novel methods. However,
Ferenc Pethe, a Georgikon lecturer who had visited England, enthusiastically
promoted English methods of varied crop rotation and intensive stock farming.
Pethe‘s frustration at the damage to character, as well as to efficiency,
caused by the feudal system mirrors the views of Széchenyi and is
amusingly expressed in his Pallérozott mezei gazdaság (Refined
Husbandry, 1805–1814): “The Englishman when he is not working sleeps while
wide awake; when he is working, he is all fire. The Hungarian, when he
is working, sleeps while he toils; when he is not working, he gets tired
fidgeting.“22
Inherent conservatism and lack of interest
in productivity gains is indeed the eternal lament of reformers, some of
whom were at least half aware that the basis for the great economic revolutions
in Britain was laid with enclosures and wealth incentives for tenant farmers;
that these in turn led to agricultural innovation and a surplus, then to
the development of financial services for longer term investment in agriculture,
but also in business and trade; and the further surpluses from these activities
went to investment in the technology and infrastructure of industrialization
that would produce higher profits and buoyant consumer markets. Miklós
Vay (1756–1824), a Calvinist and a Freemason, was one who perhaps dreamed
of kick-starting this process in his homeland, following two visits to
England (1786–88, 1790–92). To finance an eye operation in London, he sold
the patents of his English weaving and spinning machines to Count Batthyány
for 15,000 forints and set off with some crates of Tokaj aszú in
a vain attempt to interest the English in this unique product. On his return
he brought with him a carriage full of English machines and seeds, and
a good supply of potatoes, which at that time were viewed with suspicion
in Hungary. He
succeeded in popularizing the potato in
Borsod, Szabolcs and Zemplén counties, once remarking that he was
happy to hear that the peasants were beginning to steal his potatoes, since
this meant that they had finally accepted their usefulness as a staple.23
Feudalism was in unholy alliance with another
great obstacle to material progress in Hungary, namely the mercantilist
system, imposed under Maria Theresa, that relegated the country to colonial
status as the producer of cheap food for the Empire, yet provided no incentives
for making agriculture more efficient. By the same token, prospects for
industrialization were blocked by maintaining Hungary as a captive market
for Austrian manufacturers. The issue of free trade was of course not resolved
in Britain until 1846, when a Conservative Prime Minister repealed the
protectionist Corn Laws and split his party in doing so. The shortcomings
of mercantilism had, however, been brought into debate sixty years earlier
when Adam Smith published his epoch-making Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a book avidly read and greatly
admired by Széchenyi, whose father
had visited and been enormously impressed by its author. Smith‘s ideas
were also to a greater or lesser extent absorbed or embraced by Hungarian
intellectuals of the Enlightenment, such as Miklós Skerlecz, József
Podmaniczky and János Szapáry. The Piarist educated Károly
Koppi, whose career was cut short by involvement in the Jacobin conspiracy,
even wanted to found a proto-Business School in Pest‘s Pázmány
University, where students would learn about natural produce and manufacturing,
as well as commercially useful topics such as currencies, languages, orthography,
calligraphy, mathematics and economic geography.24
In general these intellectuals divided
their allegiance between the ideas of Smith and his French predecessors
such as Turgot (who coined the phrase laissez-faire in 1757) and Francois
Quesnay, the protagonist of physiocratic doctrines. It is not hard to see
the appeal of physiocracy in countries with relatively vast land reserves,
like France and 18th-century Hungary, but its fundamental thesis that only
an agricultural worker actually produced anything (everybody else, including
merchants and the bureaucracy, was merely a sterile manipulator of what
the peasant produced) was disastrously wrong-headed, as Adam Smith understood
only too well. In our own time a similar nostalgia has been expressed about
obsolescent types of manufacturing vis-à-vis the service industries
and finance, a recycling of the same superstition that wealth is created
only by the production of tangible commodities. Worse still, physiocracy
encouraged a quasi-ideological mythologization of the land and a blindness
to Adam Smith‘s great insight “that labour, not nature, was the source
of value.”25 The wasteful Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union
today is a tribute to the lingering power of the land mystique in Europe.
It is interesting that Széchenyi,
with his customary perception, fully understood the implications of Adam
Smith‘s labour-oriented espousal of free trade, while Kossuth, the protectionist,
often displayed lingering traces of physiocratic idealization of the land.
In a letter (November 17, 1855) to a Chartist newspaper, written during
his English exile, he compared the condition of exploited labour in England
and the Hungarian peasantry as follows: “In Hungary … the social evil is
not so great. Why? Because the leading feature of the country happily remained
chiefly agricultural—manufacture and commerce are only subordinate, auxiliary
elements. And agriculture in general always secures the daily bread; a
field labourer may be short in cash, but bread he has. We have therefore
but to preserve this character of our country and the social condition
of Hungary never will become as sick as that of England is; the daily existence
of millions never will be precariously subject to market prices and speculation.”26
And further: “the condition of (English) society has been framed by and
under the paramount influence of the commercial interest; which is not
productive itself, only stimulating and exchanging.” It is true, of course,
that Széchenyi had once “thanked God there [were] no factories in
Hungary,” a reaction to the often appalling social cost of industrialization
that he may have witnessed on his English travels. On the other hand, he
undertook a careful study of English, Swiss, German and Italian milling
industries before introducing the first steam mills in Hungary. In Barany‘s
words: “He pointed out that such a development would benefit farmers and
at the same time give an opportunity to otherwise resourceless people to
make a living as millhands, as coal miners in the Mohács region,
or as carpenters preparing the wooden staves to hold the flour. To assure
the success of the new enterprise, Széchenyi asked the abolition
of price controls in the flour business.”27
Such remarks throw his differences with
Kossuth into sharp relief, for Kossuth often comes close to sounding like
a Hungarian version of the conservative radical, William Cobbett (1763–1835),
with whose writings and political career he would certainly have been familiar.
The similarities become apparent in any reading of Cobbett‘s nostalgic
and fiercely indignant account of England in the depressed phase of the
agricultural revolution in the 1820‘s. As George Woodcock puts it in his
introduction to Cobbett‘s great masterpiece, Rural Rides, the old radical
was outraged “by the cottager evicted from his holding in the great enclosures
of the common lands, the farm labourer living on potatoes while he grows
beef and wheat for the city dwellers, the Catholic suffering under political
disabilities, the factory worker in Bounderby‘s Mill, the pauper insulted
by overseers and thrust into the workhouse by utilitarian philanthropists:
of all these Cobbett was the Quixotic defender.”28 On the other hand, Széchenyi,
as a great landowner, but also a perceptive observer, still believed that
successful industrialization depended on prior development of agricultural
production, which was indeed the experience of Britain. As for the mills,
by the end of the 19th century they were Hungary‘s most important export
industry, acting as catalyst to the rapidly growing business of food processing.29
Progress and nationalism
In the clear distinctions between the politico-economic
stance of Széchenyi and that of Kossuth is adumbrated a more profound
difference of approach to Hungary’s problems. Széchenyi was early
attracted to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, as the title originally planned
for his book on credit suggests (he wanted it to be called About People,
or the Bases of Happiness). There are in his thought a number of creative
tensions—that between the Benthamite principle of the happiness of the
greatest number and the respect due to the individual, or that between
the notion of economic efficiency and the potential inhumanity of a system
whose criteria of success seemed to elevate monetary value over human compassion,
or that between love of his country and contempt for the apathy, ignorance
and backwardness that prevailed there, and finally that between a belief
in the sacred mission of individual national cultures and a realization
of the necessity for supranational thinking and cosmopolitan sympathies.
In this last respect, the Anglo-Scottish
contribution to European culture is of particular interest, and the position
of Scotland culturally, politically and economically with regard to England
has some thought-provoking implications for that of Hungary in the context
of the Habsburg hegemony. David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and other
giants of the Scottish Enlightenment were the products of a Presbyterian-based,
democratically organized educational system coupled with the economic benefits
that flowed from the Act of Union with England of 1707. As Jerry Muller
has pointed out, their Calvinist heritage linked Scottish academe to the
tradition of the great universities of the Netherlands, the Scottish development
of Roman law brought its legal institutions closer to the continental legal
framework than were those of England, while a historically determined tendency
to draw inspiration from non-English sources, as well as links going back
to “the auld alliance”, created a powerful axis with the thinkers of the
French Enlightenment. Scottish intellec-tuals were often more genuinely
cosmopolitan than their English counterparts (the Grand Tour of English
milords being more an Olympian survey of foreigners coupled with a little
opportunistic antiquity purchasing); but theirs was a “provincial cosmopolitanism”
implying a strong and pragmatic impulse for self-improvement.30 In other
words, these “North Britons”, as the Lowland Scots intelligentsia preferred
to style itself, capitalized on their distinctive cultural traditions to
bring something distinctive to the notion of “Britain” and “British”, just
as their descendants were to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by going
out and running the British Empire, since they were denied the plum jobs
in the English establishment. Perhaps it is no accident that the upwardly
mobile Scot, Adam Clark, was the one who went abroad and grew in stature
in his job as Baumeister, while his superior, the Englishman Tierney Clark,
was content to be (and could afford to be) a stay-at-home administrator
of the project. Equally it may be significant that Adam Clark nobly supported
the cause of his adopted Hungary in the 1848 War of Independence, while
Tierney Clark was notoriously contemptuous of it.
The North Britons were anxious to be distinguished
from the folk museum of the Highlands on their back doorstep—it was usually
Lowlanders who, as factors to the hated Dukes of Sutherland, were responsible
for some of the most brutal of the so-called “clearances”, when the feudal
subsistence economy of the Highlands was being destroyed to make way for
intensive sheep-runs, and whole clans were driven into exile in North America
or the Antipodes. On the other hand, it was the Lowlander and antiquary,
Sir Walter Scott, who rekindled the national myth of the Land of the Gaels
that reinforced Scottish identity, succeeding in large measure in the invention
of a Kulturvolk, despite the discredit potentially attaching to such an
enterprise after the literary forgeries of Ossian. Much of Scott‘s almost
unparalleled international success as an author, not least in Hungary,
may be attributed to his achievement in re-inventing a nation that had
lost its independent statehood, and doing so by invoking a historical continuity
that upheld national dignity. Robert Walsh in his Narrative of a Journey
from Constantinople to England (1832) encounters a bookseller in Transylvanian
Hermannstadt(Nagyszeben/Sibiu) who has just placed a huge portrait on his
wall of “Le sieur Valtere Skote, l‘homme le plus célèbre
en toute l‘Europe”. French and German translations of Scott‘s novels formed
a sizeable part of his stock.31 John Paget encountered an impoverished
Jew on his Hungarian travels, who pulled from his pocket a well-thumbed
German translation of Ivanhoe, assuring the Englishman that he had read
many others of Scott‘s works and expressing profound dismay on learning
that the great man was no longer alive.32
From the point of view of a progressive
conservative, Scott‘s genius lay in reconciling national aspirations with
historical and political realities. His stage-management of George IV‘s
visit to Scotland in 1822 managed to flatter all interested parties: the
Highlanders with the myth that the roots of Scottish identity lay in the
(substantially invented) culture of the Gael, the “North Britons” with
an emphasis on their contribution to the British weal and the Hanoverian
monarch with a show of loyalty and affection, which survived even the spectacle
of the corpulent German libertine sporting a kilt. The kind of ingenious
marriage of myth and political convenience that Scott pulled off was closer
to the “synthesis of enlightened Empiricism and romantic nationalism” to
be found in the thinking of Zsigmond Kemény and others of the “Literary
Deák Party” than to Széchenyi‘s quasi-mystical Herderian
idea of the individual nation‘s unique mission, still less the myopic populism
of Kossuth.33 Interestingly, Kemény, who stood for “mediatory liberalism”,
was a popularizer of Lord Macaulay‘s intensely Whig-orientated, Protestant
and materialistic History of England in Hungary, drawing lessons from it
for his homeland in a long review of Antal Csengery‘s translation into
Hungarian of the first part of the history, published in 1853. Baron Eötvös
was also of this group and it was he who coined the pregnant phrase “peaceful
co-existence” (békés együttélés), a pragmatic
locution that suggested a way of reconciling national aspiration with political
and economic reality long before it acquired its particularized twentieth
century meaning.33
An inverted perspective:
some concluding thoughts on the influence
of the British political culture in Hungary
As will have become clear from the foregoing,
the positions of Hungary as a nation and its reformers as a political class
rendered the attraction of British ideas strong, their application difficult,
in many areas impossible. If British Protestant freemasons represented
an influence close to the heart and summit of the establishment, Hungarian
Protestant freemasons represented a distrusted (albeit substantial) minority,
even when, as in many cases, they were at least nominally loyal to the
Habsburg regime. The greatest proponent of free trade in Britain, Adam
Smith, was able to argue his case in the spirit of enlightened self-interest,
by suggesting that a blind adherence to mercantilism prevented all classes
from becoming as prosperous as they might otherwise become. Moreover, there
was a sense in which Britannia, ruling the waves and a large slice of the
world‘s markets, could afford to take the risk of abolishing the trade
barriers behind which its hegemony had actually been built up. A Hungarian
proponent of free trade was at once in collision with the interests of
the Cameralist government in Vienna, as also of the entrenched forces of
feudalism, the whole structure of which was predicated on protection from
the competitive dynamism of a capitalist economy.
Even if feudalism was done away with, Kossuth‘s
fears for the nascent bourgeois economy exposed to the blasts of competition
from economically more powerful states was understandable. Even today,
competiton is not very welcome in some sectors of what was once part of
the Austro-Hungarian economy, yet it was already instinctive to the thinking
of Adam Clark, who mounted a robust defence against critics of Tierney
Clark‘s bridge design with an argument drawn from the British experience
of industrialization: “Perhaps no other country in the world,” he wrote,
“offers a broader field for the practice of large-scale hydro-engineering
as Great Britain, whose insular location and highly developed trade makes
it necessary to build innumerable bridges, harbours, docks, canals and
so on, whereby a lively and open competition is of the utmost importance,
if such works are to be carried out at the smallest possible cost.”34 (My
italics).
Secondly, an Anglo-Scot or “North Briton”,
after the Act of Union, could preserve his national dignity while vigorously
trying to eradicate “Scotticisms” from his English speech and formal writings
(as did both Adam Smith and Walter Scott); for a Hungarian the opposite
was the case, and the revival of his native tongue in opposition to the
German of the regime became perhaps the single most important constitutent
of his national identity. And lastly, a supremely successful nation, apparently
in charge of its own destiny and largely unthreatened externally after
the defeat of Napoleon, could accommodate social and political change in
which new wealth opportunities consoled for loss of privilege. In Hungary
the dismantling of privilege and the modernization of society could plausibly
be presented by conservative vested interests as an attack on the nation
itself. It was these difficulties that Charles Dickens described in his
brilliant and
moving account of the career of Széchenyi
ten years after the latter‘s death. “Who but a dreamer,“ he writes, “would
expect a whole people, and a singularly impulsive people, to outspeed time
and pass at one stroke without stumbling from centuries of feudalism into
the most experimental and complex form of modern society?”35
What especially appealed to Dickens was
Széchenyi‘s passionate moderation, since he himself belonged to
the “change of heart” school of thought (as George Orwell termed it in
his essay on Dickens), which believes that persuasion and reason, an appeal
to conscience, will lead to a “change of heart” on the part of those who
abuse their position in society. In the same way, Dickens applauded Széchenyi‘s
views on ethnic minorities, which he describes as “to this day (i.e. 1870)
far in advance of those of his countrymen—far in advance indeed of the
opinions that still prevail in England respecting the treatment of alien
races” and capable of being studied to advantage by any Englishman “who
shares the inherited responsibility of governing Ireland and India.”36
Like Széchenyi, the progressive liberal in Dickens sought to square
the circle, to achieve both liberty and justice. Yet as a pragmatist, he
would probably have seen the force of Baron Eötvös‘s argument
in Der Einfluss der herrschenden Ideen des 19. Jahrhunderts auf den Staat
(1851–54), namely that equality, liberty and nationality were often mutually
contradictory ideas. In Eötvös‘s view, levels of civilization
were hard to judge, since greater freedom for some was always at the cost
of greater inequality and economic repression for others (he cites the
English treatment of the Irish and the American exploitation of slaves
and slaughtering of native Americans). Nonetheless, Dickens is drawn to
Széchenyi‘s moral position, which is close to his own: he quotes
approvingly Széchenyi‘s exhortation to remember that “our salvation
depends, not on the assertion of political power, but the cultivation of
personal virtue.” By the same token, he is hostile to Kossuth, citing Széchenyi‘s
famous denunciation of the populist, where he puts words into his opponent‘s
mouth that could have come from one of the more histrionic passages in
a Dickens novel: “...I aspired to command others, I could not govern myself.
It was my boast to be the benefactor of my country. It is my shame to have
been only the puppet of her popular passions.”37
When faced with officially sponsored injustice,
English bourgeois radicals like Charles Dickens were eloquent in their
denunciation, but they were no revolutionaries. Somewhere, they believed,
a middle way could be found between quietism and violence, even if 19th-century
Britain had seen plenty of both, not to mention Ireland. It was perhaps
this middle way of working with the grain of political realities, yet trying
to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of their opponents, that seemed
to offer a way forward for the moderate, centralist reformers in Hungary.
Széchenyi himself gave expression to this often paradoxical mixture
of moral passion and conservative caution when he proclaimed: “I have awakened
my countrymen in order that they might walk upright and conduct themselves
like men; not in order that they may throw themselves out of the window.”38
Symbolically, as well as materially, the erection of the Chain Bridge was
part of his great project to awaken his countrymen to new life; the best
that Britain had to offer (pragmatism, commercial skills, technology),
had a vital role to play in that noble undertaking. Whether or not we can
speak of British influence on his strategy for change, the latter was certainly
(and despite the evident impulsiveness of Szécheny‘s personality)
very close in spirit to the methods of piecemeal reform favoured in Britain:
“I prefer,” he told Baron Langsdorff in 1837, “to catch the bull by the
tail rather than by the horns: the secret of political forces, as also
of
mechanical forces, is to use only the amount
required for the aim that one wants to attain.”39
1 n This and other quotations from Count
István Széchenyi‘s diaries or correpondence are taken from
George Barany: Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian
Nationalism, 1791–1841. Princeton, 1968. This remark is cited on p. 268.
2 n Michael Joseph Quin: A Steam Voyage
down the Danube. London, 1835. Vol 1. pp. 3, 6–7.
3 n W. M. Thackeray: “De Juventute” in
Roundabout Papers. Cited in The Victorian Mind Ed. Gerald B. Kauvar and
Gerald C. Sorensen. London, 1969. p. 119.
4 n Cited in The Victorian Mind p. 118,
and taken from Samuel Smiles: The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer.
Chapter XXV: “Advance of Public Opinion in Favour of the Railway”. 5 n
Ferenc Pulszky: Aus dem Tagebuche eines in Grobritannien reisenden Ungarn.
Pesth. 1837.
pp. 2, 3, 101.
6 n Quoted in É. H. Haraszti: “Contemporary
Hungarian Reactions to the Anti-Corn Law Movement” in Acta Historica VIII
Nos. 3–4, 1961. p. 397. 7 n Barany: op. cit. pp. 74–75.
8 n Transl. by Iain MacLeod pp. 348 and
349–350 in Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary” Ed. Adam Makkai.
Chicago–Budapest 1996.
9 n Vilmos Fraknói: Gróf
Széchényi Ferencz. Budapest, 1903. pp. 112–116
10 n Cited in David Thomson: Political
Ideas. Harmsworth, 1969. p. 81. 11 n Éva H. Balázs: Hungary
and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800. Budapest, London, New York, 1997, p. 305.
12 n Margaret C. Jacob: Living the Enlightenment:
Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe. Oxford, 1991. p.
151.
13 n For this information and that in the
following paragraph I have drawn heavily on Éva H. Balázs‘s
remarkable study Hungary and the Habsburgs: 1765–1800. See Note 11. 14
n Éva H. Balázs: op cit. p. 43.
15 n See George Barany: “The Liberal Challenge
and its Limitations: The Religious Question at the Diet of 1843–1844.”
In: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed. György Ránki. Budapest,
1989. p. 33.
16 n See Géza Hajós: Romantische
Gärten der Aufklärung: Englische Landschaftskultur des 18. Jahrhunderts
in und um Wien–Wien. Köln, 1989. Chapter IV: Die Freimaurerei und
der englische Garten in Wien.
17 n Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook: “Die
Erneuerung der Hauptstadt — John Nash und das “Ma-lerische’” in Metropole
London: Macht und Glanz einer Weltstadt 1800–1840. Recklinghausen, 1992.
p. 81.
18 n Quoted in Susanne M. Balpataky: Stephen
Széchenyi and his Socio-Economic and Political Ideas. MA Research
Paper prepared for Professor
C. Brock. Toronto, 1972. p. 45.
19 n For a coruscating account of this
episode,
see: B. G. Ivanyi: “From Feudalism to Capitalism: The Economic Background
to Széchenyi‘s Reform in Hungary.” Journal of Central European Affairs.
Vol. 20, No. 1. 1960. pp. 282–284.
20 n Jerry Z. Muller: Adam Smith in His
Time and Ours. Princeton, 1993. p. 116.
21 n Paul Ignotus: Hungary. New York, 1972.
p. 60.
22 n For this quotation and much of the
information on English agricultural ideas transferred to Hungary, I am
indebted to János Barta: “The English ‘New Agriculture’ in Contemporary
Hungarian Agricultural Literature.” Debrecen, 1974. Angol Filológiai
Tanulmányok VIII. pp. 77–89.
23 n For information about Miklós
Vay, I am indebted to an article by Orsolya Szakály: Vay Miklós
és az 1807. évi országgyuýlés in FONS.
Vol. IV. 1997. 3. No. 3., pp. 301–323.
24 n Éva H. Balázs: op cit.
pp. 296–297.
25 n Robert Heilbroner: The Worldly Philosophers.
6th Ed. London, 1991. p. 49.
26 n Quoted in É. Haraszti–Taylor:
Kossuth as an English Journalist. Boulder, Colorado, 1990, pp. 393–395.
27 n Barany: op. cit. pp. 335 and 337.
28 n Introduction by George Woodcock to
William Cobbett: Rural Rides. London, 1967 (1830). p. 8.
29 n Barany: op cit. p. 337.
30 n See Muller: op. cit. pp. 22–23.
31 n Robert Walsh: Narrative of a Journey
from Constantinople to England. London, 1832. p. 302.
32 n John Paget: Hungary and Transylvania
(2 Vols.). London 1839. Vol. 1. pp. 120–121.
33 n For a detailed examination of the
synthesis achieved between Romanticism and the empiricism of the Enlightenment,
see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: “Enlightenment and Liberalism
in the Works of Széchenyi, Kemény and Eötvös” (from
which this remark is taken) in: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed.
György Ránki. Budapest. p. 24.
34 n Adam Clark: Einige Worte über
den Bau der Ofner-Pesther Kettenbrücke. Pest, 1843. p. 5.
35 n Charles Dickens “All the Year Round”
in New Series Vol. III. 1869–1870. p. 480.
36 n Dickens: op. cit. p. 455
37 n Dickens: op. cit p. 456
38 n Quoted in Dickens, op cit. p. 454
39 n Cited in Barany: op. cit. P. 460.
(…— parce que j‘aime mieux tirer le taureau par la queue, que le prendre
par les cornes: le secret des forces politiques, comme celui des forces
mécaniques est de n‘en employer que la quantité nécessaire
au but qu‘on veut attaindre.” The source is Baron Langsdorff‘s report to
the French Ambassador Sainte-Aulaire, Pest 10th June, 1837.
n The author would like to thank Erzsébet
Tokaji-Nagy and her colleagues at the Országos Széchényi
Könyvtár for valuable assistance rendered in tracking down
sources for this article. In addition thanks are due to Robert Evans, Móritz
Csáky, Eva Csáky, Géza Galavics and Orsolya Szakály
for information generously given. Last but not least Ilona Sármány-Parsons
patiently assisted with Hungarian translations and read the first draft
with a sharp eye. Responsibility for any errors that remain are the author’s
alone.
Nicholas T. Parsons
is the author of the Xenophobe’s Guide
to the Austrians (Ravette Books, 1994) and The Blue Guide to Vienna (1996).
The following is an abridged version of
a chapter to appear in a volume celebrating the 150th anniversary of the
Chain Bridge, to be published in 1999 by the office of the Mayor of Budapest
.
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