László Kontler - Böcker

This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates’ power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.

This volume investigates the history of the parliamentary assemblies of Sweden, Poland and Hungary in the final period of the ancien régime, offering an analysis of these three representative assemblies in a systematic comparative framework for the first time.The book studies the Polish sejm, the Swedish riksdag and the Hungarian diaeta, focusing on the eighteenth century with retrospective consideration of developments in the previous century and a forward-looking gaze at the events of the following era. While Volume I of this series mapped the institutional framework and focused on the MPs’ motivation, this book concentrates on the forms and practices that characterized these three representative institutions, with special attention paid to the questions of free mandate and majority voting. The freedom of mandates and the emergence of majority voting are explored in comparative studies (England and Poland) or parallel chapters (Sweden and Hungary), and the most important prerogative of these representative assemblies, a control on extraordinary taxes, is explored in parallel for Sweden and Hungary.Intended for specialist readers, postgraduate students and scholars, this research will be of particular interest to those studying early modern European history and political history.

A History of Hungary: Millennium in Central Europe provides a comprehensive yet approachable survey of Hungarian history from the prehistoric age to the present day. Politics and culture, economic, social and intellectual developments, and the wider European context are integrated in a single narrative.László Kontler adeptly steers the reader through ancient times, the great migration of peoples, and the creation and troubles of a Christian monarchy that arose in the region wedged between the Baltic and the Balkans, and the Germanic and Russian lands. He then explores factors such as socio-economic backwardness and foreign rule which put Hungary at a disadvantage in coping with the challenges of modernity - a process marked by revolutions, wars of independence, historic compromises and territorial losses. The book includes a detailed discussion of the 'socialist' period, while a brief Epilogue assesses the achievements and the difficulties of the present process of transition to democracy.

The notions of happiness and trust as cements of the social fabric and political legitimacy have a long history in Western political thought. However, despite the great contemporary relevance of both subjects, and burgeoning literatures in the social sciences around them, historians and historians of thought have, with some exceptions, unduly neglected them. In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, editors László Kontler and Mark Somos bring together twenty scholars from different generations and academic traditions to redress this lacuna by contextualising historically the discussion of these two notions from ancient Greece to Soviet Russia. Confronting this legacy and deep reservoir of thought will serve as a tool of optimising the terms of current debates. Contributors are: Erica Benner, Hans W. Blom, Niall Bond, Alberto Clerici, Cesare Cuttica, John Dunn, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Gábor Gángó, Steven Johnstone, László Kontler, Sara Lagi, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Adrian O’Connor, Eva Odzuck, Kálmán Pócza, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Peter Schröder, Petra Schulte, Mark Somos, Alexey Tikhomirov, Bee Yun, and Hannes Ziegler.

The Viennese Jesuit court astronomer Maximilian Hell was a key figure in the eighteenth-century circulation of knowledge. He was already famous by the time of his celebrated 1769 expedition for the observation of the transit of Venus in northern Scandinavia. However, the 1773 suppression of his order forced Hell to develop ingenious strategies of accommodation to changing international and domestic circumstances. Through a study of his career in local, regional, imperial, and global contexts, this book sheds new light on the complex relationship between the Enlightenment, Catholicism, administrative and academic reform in the Habsburg monarchy, and the practices and ends of cultivating science in the Republic of Letters around the end of the first era of the Society of Jesus.