Describe and Govern

My project inquires into the intellectual foundation of state building in the Habsburg Monarchy from the late 18th century until the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, 1867. It focuses on factual knowledge about the state in the so-called state descriptions (Staatenkunde, descriptive statistics). Despite its popularity the excitement accompanying the publication of contemporary encyclopaedies is not unlike the interest in Wikipedia today historians ignored the study of Staatenkunde and considered it outdated and unimportant by the end of the Napoleonic wars. The starting point of my project is the unimpeded popularity of state descriptions. Indeed, Staatenkunde was practised simultaneously in all the corners of the Monarchy, addressing everywhere the same components and functions of the state and underpinned their findings with empirical facts. The sensational trait of state descriptions was thus, as claimed by my project, the capacity of Staatenkunde to contrbute to identical ways of speaking about the state and the administration, the counties and the towns, the population and the economic resources. In short, I claim that this modest discipline helped create a shared administrative language across the entire Monarchy from Tyrol to Transylvania. This again was vital for the administrative integration of the lands and the shaping of a more efficient management of the Habsburg conglomerate. The project links disparate fields of study to overcome the heritage of linguistically divided national historiographies: the history of statistics with the history of public administration, with newer approaches to the links between knowledge and power in the (early) modern state. The methods involve the analysis of Staatenkunde networks in various lands of the Monarchy and the analysis of their works. The latter focuses on key themes, like the state and the citizens, and ways of conveying big data (description or quantification, comparison and approximation etc.) about them in a time of strict censorship about politically sensitive data. In the end I shall write a monograph and build an interactive online map about the traveling of knowledge about the state in the Habsburg lands. The goal is to grasp contemporary knowledge about the state, but also feelings of solidarity and belonging in a time of the integration, often in violent ways, of very different lands and regions into a common political formation in the middle of Europe.

The integration of composite territories has been a major challenge to European state formation. My project explored the intellectual basis of this process in the Habsburg Monarchy by analyzing Staatenkunde (descriptive or academic statistics) starting from the introduction of this discipline into the legal education curricula in the 1770s and until the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. While traditional historiography largely ignored the study of this field prior to the early 19th century, my research investigated its resilience in the Habsburg space and beyond. The study came to conclusion that this field of knowledge had an integrative function by shaping an empirically grounded administrative discourse of the state, which took place simultaneously in all the Habsburg lands. In view of the composite structure of the Habsburg polity and the centrifugal nation-state buildings within it, the study showed how public knowledge about the state fostered the integration of the socio-political space, while asking about the capacity of this literature to provide uniform definition of the state and the administration, its material and immaterial resources. In contrast to hitherto studies my study established Staatenkunde as a resilient composite knowledge of the state, indeed, an encyclopedic and modular way of seeing that combined law and history with empirical knowledge in geography, ethnography and the economy. At the same time, it incorporated the quantitative methods of the statistical bureaus. The study showed that this scholarly - discursive integration was politically equivocal: while Staaatenkunde contributed to the integration of the Austrian provinces on an economic basis, it also fostered the national state-building in Hungary on political and legal grounds. My study draws attention to agency of the intellectual milieus that preceded, complemented and corrected governmental institutions in producing knowledge that was relevant for the administration. Descriptive statistics had been integral part of legal education since the 1790s, but it was simultaneously a regionally embedded civic enterprise lasting until the 1870s. The project uncovered the important role of the intermediary level of the historic provinces, private sponsors and civic organizations as partners or complementary agents of the central government in producing empirical knowledge about the state. Their role was particularly important in cases of Statistik, where the social practice preceded the statistical bureaus by many decades (the Austrian Statistical Bureau was founded in 1829, its Hungarian counterpart in 1867).