“By and By We Shall Have an Enlightened Populace”: Moral Optimism and the Fine Arts in Late-Eighteenth-Century Austria

Abstract

I should like to begin by recalling my own occasional points of contact with Robert Kann. When his first book, the great two-volume work on the nationality problem in the Habsburg Empire, was published, I was a student about to embark on research on eighteenth-century Austria, and took little notice of any large works not on my research period. Later, teaching nineteenth-century European history, I came to appreciate its wide range and deep insights. By the time his highly original Study in Austrian Intellectual History was published in 1960, my career as a historian had prospered sufficiently for me to be offered this book for review by a leading British historical periodical. I commented very positively on his analysis of Abraham a Sancta Clara. Turning to the chapters on Joseph von Sonnenfels, however, I took the opportunity of presenting some results of my own research on Sonnenfels, which had only just been published and which I thought called some of his judgments into question. Unlike many Central European academics of his generation, Robert Kann did not resent criticism by a younger colleague; hence I have memories of some pleasant and stimulating meetings with him in Vienna during the time he held an honorary professorship there.