ABSTRACT
While many of the reforms enacted or attempted in Prussia by Frederick II and in Austria by Maria Theresia and Joseph II can be explained in terms of more or less distinct and subordinate objectives with their own rationale, one supreme and overriding goal was intended to be served by all of them: the steady strengthening of the state to meet challenges – chiefly military ones – from existing or future enemies on the international scene. This is true even of those humanitarian reforms which appear to have embodied the noblest and most charitable of motivations, for these too served to build the health and numbers of the labour force and to bring greater order and discipline to populations whose productivity and reliability were of vital importance to the unity of the state; the welfare state, as one historian has noted, has often been closely related to the warfare state. 1 In particular, the results of the three Silesian wars had decreed that the Empire was henceforth to contain two European great powers; this situation, novel to German history, was to have a profound effect not only on the relationship of the two German powers to each other, but also on their policies towards the Empire and the rest of Europe as well.
