Habsburg Civil Servants: Between Civil Society and the State
Edited by Alexander Maxwell and Daša Ličen
The Habsburg Empire’s development into a modern nation state was, necessarily, bound up with the emergence of a vast bureaucratic network of civil servants. Responsible for addressing diverse social problems in areas such as education, public transportation, and health services, these officials enabled the Habsburg monarchy to maintain rule over geographically disparate domains. While Habsburg civil servants were often maligned as instruments of an oppressive regime, this volume provides a new perspective on their lives during the nineteenth century, spotlighting how they simultaneously constituted and challenged the state. In doing so, Habsburg Civil Servants reconceptualizes our understanding of the boundary between the realms of the state and the public.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Habsburg Civil Servants between Civil Society and the State – Daša Ličen, Alexander Maxwell
Chapter 1. Austrian Officials and the Making of the Polish-Ruthenian Divide, 1815-1848 – Hugo Lane
Chapter 2. Habsburg Officials and the “Slavic Language” – Alexander Maxwell
Chapter 3. Identity Choices among State and County Officials in Late Habsburg Transylvania – Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici
Chapter 4. To Promote and Protect: Everyday Monarchism among Teachers and Prosecutors in the Bohemian Crownlands, 1869-1914 – Marco Jaimes
Chapter 5. The Social Base of the Habsburg Bureaucracy: From Dalmatian Sektionschefs in Vienna to Bohemian Foresters in Korčula/Curzola – Wolfgang Göderle
Chapter 6. The Civil Service in the Factory: Trade Inspectors and Working-Class Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1884–1914 – Zdeněk Nebřenský
Chapter 7. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Prague Police during the Street Politics around 1900 – David Smrček
Chapter 8. Civil-Military Relations on the Eve of the Great War: A Crisis in Habsburg Dalmatia? – John Deak
Chapter 9. The Right Man in the Right Place? Hans Loewenfeld-Russ and the Austrian Nutrition Office, 1914-1920 – J. Alexander Killion
Index
About the Editors
Alexander Maxwell is Associate Professor at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Prior to taking up his position at Victoria University, he taught at universities in Swansea, Wales and Reno, Nevada, gaining his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia (London, 2009),Patriots Against Fashion (London, 2014) and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary (Berlin, 2019). Currently working on a book about the language-dialect dichotomy in government administrations, he has guest-edited issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, The New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics.
Daša Ličen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maribor and a researcher at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She completed her PhD at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2021. Specializing in the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnology, and history, she is currently writing a book on late Habsburg Trieste’s bourgeoisie.
232 pages / 2025
Volume 37 of the book series Austrian and Habsburg Studies
https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MaxwellHabsburg