Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

The Intellectual Horizons of Liberal Nationalism in Hungaryabsence of Hungarian publications, he could only rely on a limited rangeof sources and his statistical data was drawn on foreign books. Notwithstandingthese shortcomings, Horváth’s account, especially when completedwith a second part, entitled “The history of trade and industry in thelast three centuries,” was a remarkable achievement. His Central and EastEuropean contemporaries also sought to tackle issues of commerce andindustry. They managed to devise, even if they could not fully exploit thepotential of the topic, a new framework of historiography, which sought tosupersede the history of royal dynasties. However, most of them did notget as far in their analysis as Horváth.Also, Horváth went further than his contemporaries in the applicationof foreign material on trade and commerce to the conditions of hisown nation, for which he borrowed the ideological and intellectual frameworkof a handful of German historians of the late-Enlightenment. Hismain inspiration came, as mentioned above, from the works of ArnoldHeeren, but he also drew on other representatives and transmitters of thelate Enlightenment, particularly the German Aufklärung, such as WilhelmWachsmuth, Ludwig T. Spittler, or Karl D. Hüllmann. For Horváth, whothought that “the flowers of a more noble humanity” can only blossomwhere a powerful middle-class exists, the German historians’ understandingof the middle class as the main catalyst of societal developmentseemed especially relevant.The works of the above-mentioned German historians, especiallytheir reading of European history as a transition from a feudal to a modernand commercial social system, fit into the broader framework ofEnlightenment historiography. This interpretation was developed by thehistories of Voltaire, Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, whose main concernwas to show how the medieval feudal-agricultural society, characterized byan absence of all but aristocratic liberties and by oppressive aristocraticjurisdiction, was eventually eroded by the incorporation of cities, thedevelopment of new technologies, the expansion of domestic and overseasmarket and the relative decline of aristocratic wealth. 8 Besides the influenceof the aforementioned German scholars, a close examination ofHorváth’s ideas on trade and industry reveals similarities with the mentalityof the Scottish Enlightenment, especially William Robertson. This isnot accidental: although there is no direct evidence of Horváth’s familiaritywith Robertson’s works, the preference of these German historians(especially the Göttingen school) for the representatives of the ScottishEnlightenment seems to have had an impact on Horváth’s work.Montesquieu was another favorite thinker of the Aufklärung and hisworks enjoyed great popularity in Hungary in the Reform Era. Horváthwas not only familiar with his writings, but also made a “contribution” to27