This article is a response to Daniela Tinková’s study Enlightenment as ‘vernacularization of knowledge’. In the first part we comment on the positive aspects of Tinková’s conception of the history of the Enlightenment, but also on the lack of clarity concerning the nature of knowledge as both a component of cultural transfer and the outcome of that process. The second part changes perspective, focussing on ‘the transfer of Enlightenment’ and the ‘radiation’ of Enlightenment from the Czech Lands to surrounding regions of the Habsburg monarchy, especially Galicia. For this reason the Czech Lands assumed a regional hegemony in many areas of administration and economic and intellectual life. We also attempt to explain the motivations for accepting ‘Enlightenment knowledge’ while relativizing the power asymmetries in these processes.
This study, in the form of an essay or first draft of opening remarks delivered at an international conference on Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, presents one of many possible models for the conceptualization of the Enlightenment in the Czech Lands. Here Enlightenment is conceived as a process whereby ‘knowledge’ (information) is disseminated and gradually democratized and information networks are expanded. This conception draws primarily on theories of vernacularization and cultural transfer. In view of the directional dynamic, we have focussed mainly on ‘unidirectional’ flow in the sense of dispersal from (informational/cultural) centres to the (informational/cultural) periphery – both socioeconomically (transfer to lower social classes) and geographically (transfer to rural areas remote from major urban and educational centres). In this model, the process of vernacularization and democratization of knowledge was divided into three periods: the early formation of educated elites; the ‘acculturation’ of the middle classes; and the extension of information networks to the petty intelligentsia – and through them to the wider rural population. This last phase, carried out as part of a ‘programme’ of popular enlightenment around the turn of the 19th century, more or less coincided, in the theory Miroslav Hroch, with the first and second phases of the Czech National Revival and relied on the same media (Czech-language newspapers, ‘popular’ literature) and authors (Kramerius, Tomsa, Rulík, et al.)
This study is a response to the preceding discussion on the original essay on the concept of enlightenment. It examines the relationship between enlightenment, national revival and Romanticism, issues of popular enlightenment, and the role of the Catholic clergy in the Enlightenment, with further remarks on the phases and specific features of the Czech Enlightenment.
The aim of the article is to explain the transformation of accounting with reference to two Moravian cities, Olomouc and Uničov, between the mid-18th and 19th centuries. The article summarizes the concept of cameralism, the practical reasons for accounting reforms at the central level of the monarchy, and the beginnings of cameral accounting in the second half of the 18th century. The first legislation on the introduction of cameral accounting in municipal government dates from 1768; however, even after that year and indeed until 1922, individual cities continued to have a major influence on the specific form of accounting they used. Although sources from the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century are preserved only fragmentally, the main change in Olomouc and Uničov, as well as in towns in the Czech borderland studied by Petr Cais, happened around 1850, when the cities started accepting printed forms that remained in use for almost a century. In 1922, binding rules for accounting and cash desk service were published, but this had little effect on the accounting records of Olomouc and Uničov. Their journals and main accounting books maintained approximately the same form and structure regardless of this turning point. Neither did they reflect the various changes in the political system of the Czech state, up until the end of World War II. From this point of view, the cameral accounting technique designed by Enlightenment economists can be seen as a fundamental contribution to the modernization of accounting in our territory.