The Dynamics of Austrian Governance, 1780–1848

JOSEPH II suffered grievously at the end of his short life. He suffered from tuberculosis and was too weak to fight political battles anymore. His illness and his recent military and political failures soon led to depression. As he wrote to his brother and successor, Leopold, in lines that have become associated with his reign: "I confess that, brought low by what has happened to me, seeing that I am unfortunate in everything I undertake, the appalling ingratitude with which my good arrangements are viewed and I am treated ... all this fills me with doubt." Joseph died February 20, 1790, less than a month later. He had ordered a simple, unadorned sarcophagus for himself, befitting the emperor's taste for the simple, functional, and miserly.

Traditionally, historians have seen the death of Joseph and the rise of Emperor Francis as the beginning of the end — the moment in which the monarchy sets down the road toward decline. This is especially the case within the grand narrative of German history, which seeks to explain why Prussia would eventually unite Germany. In the widely accepted narrative, Austria stood still while Prussia was forced to reform itself and become a modern state. But such ideas suggest that Joseph's reforms and the institutions he created did not continue after his rule came to an end. This was not the case, however. First, the institutions that Joseph's successors inherited, especially the administration and the legions of officials who staffed it, continued the work of state building. Second, Joseph's most revolutionary action as monarch was the implementation of a new attitude — both toward rule and toward the Austrian state. This attitude would, over the course of his reign, permeate the imperial public administration and become a new ethos of state service. Joseph conceived the very concept of the Pragmatic Sanction and the indivisible and inseparable monarchy as depending on the networks of officials and public servants whom Vienna sent out into the hinterland. Joseph was able to imagine a centralized, unified monarchy and he worked to pound his lands into a mold that fit his preconceived ideas. It would be this attitude, "Josephinism," or Joseph's reformist, state-centered ethos, which would continue well after his death and shape the Austrian state-building project in the nineteenth century. In fact, Joseph's departure from the scene in 1790 allowed his officials the freedom and independence to develop these ideas further and adapt them to the rapid changes of the nineteenth century, which brought with them not only new forms of industry and social change, but an increasing call for public participation in governance.

Joseph's legacy is an important one, but it was not the only ethos which permeated the Austrian state in the nineteenth century. Joseph's radical changes, his relentless drive to reform, was exhausting to some and struck others as dangerous. "Change" increasingly became something to fear, a slippery slope that would lead to revolution, social unrest, and anarchy. Fear of change only intensified with the outbreak of the French Revolution, which was held up as the possible outcome of state policies that sought to displace the nobility and alter the structures of social and economic life. Joseph's successors increasingly turned away from reform and political change in order to maintain stability. Joseph's state-reforming ethos quickly fell out of favor at court, even if it was preserved in the offices of Habsburg administrators.

In essence, the period between Joseph II and the revolutions of 1848 established the modern Austrian dynamic: an interplay between storm and tranquility — between reform and its opposite, a desire to hold onto tradition and leave things as they are. This dynamic would structure political and social developments in the Habsburg monarchy from the late eighteenth century to the monarchy's entry into the First World War in July 1914. For it was this interplay, not reaction, retrenchment, or incubation, that produced both Austria's political frustrations and its flexibility in organizing and administering a multinational space in the center of Europe. Both forces, reform and resistance, were forged in the era of Joseph II and the French Revolution.

The Dynamic of Movement: Change and Reform

How should a monarch handle a body of civilian officials? What are they capable of doing? Joseph had been pondering these questions since his twentieth birthday. When he became co-regent in 1765 upon the death of his father, he could finally put many of his ideas into action. If Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz had made the argument under Maria Theresia that the presence of the crown's officials in the provinces was necessary to enforce the crown's will, Joseph II wanted these officials to be capable of much more. He wanted to instill them with a spirit that would match the system. In fact, he showed a deep — if sometimes harsh — interest in Austria's corps of civil servants from his early involvement in the Council of State and throughout his co-regency with Maria Theresia (1765–80) and years of his sole rule (1780–90). Joseph II's legacy, despite many of the reforms he attempted, would turn out to be the bureaucracy he left behind, "which held together the socially complex multinational empire until its fall."

Joseph's attitude and his revisioning of the work of the state were his greatest and most consequential innovations. He imagined a state that was an entity in itself, a public good, which extended far beyond his own person. Joseph believed that the role of the state should be to benefit the largest number of people possible. Under Joseph, the state — this abstract entity that provides and encapsulates the common good — eclipsed the ruler and his dynasty. Joseph imbued his civil servants with these views, founding their self-conception as the guardians of the state. For them, self- sacrifice and service to the state — which took the form of the primary progressive agent in society — were the highest calling, a secular priesthood.

The drive for centralization, uniformity, and control brought Joseph again and again to devote his attention to his imperial civil servants, the officials who enacted his decrees and represented his authority outside the walls of Vienna. All of this imperial attention — imbued with the same principles of rationality, uniformity, and the value of efficiency — created a modern, professional civil service in the Weberian sense. Additionally, however, Joseph believed in the transformative...