TY - JOUR AU - Kurucz, György PY - 2022/06/16 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Enlightenment, Modernization, Professional Training: Count György Festetics’s Role in Establishing Agricultural Higher Education in Hungary at the End of the Eighteenth Century JF - Historical Studies on Central Europe JA - hsce VL - 2 IS - 1 SE - Nobility in Action II DO - 10.47074/HSCE.2022-1.05 UR - https://ojs.elte.hu/hsce/article/view/3599 SP - 92-119 AB - <p>Western historical narratives of the Enlightenment tend to depict the eighteenth-century<br>aristocracy as a unique promoter of overall progress, whereas Hungarian historiography is more<br>inclined to appraise their role according to a deprecating approach based on the criticism of a<br>traditional class system. However, it seems clear that a more balanced judgement of the Hungarian<br>aristocracy should involve a complex analysis. In first place, it is to be decided whether erudite and<br>financially well-off individuals existed, and if so, to what extent they were willing and capable of<br>contributing to various forms of innovation, let alone social and cultural progress. For this reason, this<br>paper is designed to focus on the activities of Count György Festetics, a Transdanubian Hungarian<br>aristocrat who was educated in the Theresianum, an elite Viennese training institute, but whose<br>career prospects were thwarted at the end of the eighteenth century on account of his involvement<br>with the anti-Habsburg movement of Hungary’s lesser nobility on the death of Emperor Joseph II.<br>This analysis seems justifiable, because Festetics’s decision to set up a farming college in Keszthely<br>clearly shows his commitment to progress, aiming at the adaptation of modern methods as well<br>as creating the institutional background for the dissemination of specialist knowledge among the<br>various layers of contemporary society.</p> ER -