Kiváltságosok az állam és a közjó szolgálatában. Joseph von Sonnenfels nemesség koncepciójáról
The Privileged in the Service of the State and the Common Good. On Joseph von Sonnenfels’ Concept of Nobility

Summary/Abstract: Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732/3–1817) was one of the most colorful and significant theoreticians of the Habsburg Monarchy’s government in the second half of 18th century. Due to his works of various genres as well as his scientific and public activity he was an emblematic figure of the so-called Austrian enlightened absolutism. The paper aims at describing Sonnenfels’ concept of society, and particularly his ideas about nobility in context. During the elaboration of the issue the key notions of enlightened absolutism such as state (statehood) and science of administration (cameralism) are discussed in detail, as the clarification of these notions is essential to a meaningful description of Sonnenfels’ ideas. He did not publish his conception of nobility in a single, independent and coherent work, rather he discussed his related ideas in separate scientific, journalistic and miscellaneous writings, which provide scholars with a jigsaw puzzle of his ideas. The purpose of the paper is to describe Sonnenfels’ ideas in such a way as to avoid blending the diversity of approaches (which are indeed contradictory sometimes), and to draw a picture that reflects the different genres and the author’s presumed intentions. The integration of the privileged strata of society into the 18th-century state, undergoing modernization, was a process full of tensions, as illustrated by the particularly interesting example of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Hungarian nobility. Sonnenfels’ fragmentary ideology provided a possible model for this socio-cultural integration, the influence of which can be regarded as essential due to its popularity.

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