P hilip S teiner . Die Landstände in Steiermark, Kärnten und Krain und die Josephinischen Reformen

Philip Steiner’s Die Landstände in Steiermark, Kärnten und Krain und die josephinischen Reformen is a very substantial volume, the research for which was undertaken within the framework of a larger project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on Established Order under Threat (Bedrohte Ordnung). A subsection of that project addressed a theme related to the Habsburg monarchy in the eighteenth century: “Josephinism, the Catholic Church and the Landed Aristocracy: Threatened Constellations in Inner Austria.” Philip Steiner’s contribution focuses on the landed aristocracy of the so-called “inner Austrian” provinces of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, especially its response to the famous sweeping land and tax reform of Emperor Joseph II of 1789. The sonorous German subtitle, which might be translated as “communication strategies concerning perceived threats to the social order in light of competing conceptions of that order in the period from 1789 to 1792,” summarizes well the scope and intent of the volume. The landed aristocracy perceived Joseph’s land and tax reform as an existential threat and a frontal assault on its property rights and successfully pressured the emperor’s successor, Leopold II, to revoke the decree. The discussions surrounding this, however, launched a series of constitutional debates—conduced in part under the shadow of events unfolding in France—in which the aristocracy sought to reassert prerogatives of provincial estates that had been curtailed by the reforms of what we have come to call “enlightened absolutism.”

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