ABSTRACT
In spite of its military failures, Rákóczi’s war of independence is considered by the latest Hungarian historical research to have been an indisputable success. The treaty of Szatmár ensured political privileges for the Hungarian estates that were unparalleled in the Habsburg Monarchy, and which were rare elsewhere in Europe, too. These liberties, however, would hinder not only the extension of royal power but also those reforms that became necessary after the long Ottoman occupation. In the decades after the Treaty of Szatmár, the court had to employ a variety of instruments of political persuasion to achieve its goals, goals that fundamentally determined the culture of politics in Hungary until the mid-1760s. Cultural history came to the fore in historiography from the 1970s onwards. It is typical of its success that since then almost all fields of the past have deserved their cultural history. Later the cultural-historical approach came to embrace the field of politics as well. In this chapter, I want to reflect on the results of the ‘German school’ concerning the eighteenth-century ‘estate politics’ (ständische Politik).
