4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Anti-Prussian sentiment ran high in the monarchy of 1870, yet at the Crown Council of 18 July—Franz Joseph, Andrássy, Beust, Kuhn, and Potocki around the table—Austria-Hungary chose neutrality with only preparatory armament. Engel-Janosi reads that choice not as simple weakness but as the sum of converging constraints. Potocki's federalist ministry, which would have granted the crownlands almost the status of American federal states, had deepened rather than resolved the monarchy's internal paralysis, while the Eastern Question tied any western war to Russia's designs on Constantinople and to unrest in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt. Drawing on ministerial protocols and American diplomatic reports, the essay presents neutrality not as grand design but as the only policy the Dual Monarchy's divided structure could sustain.
Prokesch hatte recht: es war, als seien die Segel eines Schiffes so gesetzt, daß sie gegeneinander wirkten.
English translation: “Prokesch was right: it was as though the sails of a ship had been set so as to work against one another.”
The 'execution' of the 1856 Paris treaty, Engel-Janosi argues, was precisely the process by which the post-Crimean order came apart. Following the Eastern Question from that settlement to the Franco-Sardinian war of 1859, the essay makes Cavour's schemes over Moldavia and Wallachia inseparable from his Italian designs, with Napoleon III—hostile to a merely preserved Ottoman Empire, drawn to Balkan nationality, never wholly clear in plan—as its hinge. The Constantinople chapters read as a prosopography of policy: Stratford de Redcliffe's anti-Russian reformism, Prokesch-Osten's defence of Ottoman individuality, Thouvenel executing a French line he privately distrusted. The manipulated Romanian elections of 1857 and Cuza's double election bind Ottoman decline, Romanian unification, and Italian nationalism into a single crisis of legitimacy—inherited legality hammered by a ruthless new politics.
Wenn dies, wie wir allen Grund haben zu hoffen, das Ende der Welt sein soll, wird alles irgendwie geregelt werden. Wenn dies jedoch nicht das Ende der Welt ist, wird alles noch viel schlechter werden.
English translation: “If this, as we have every reason to hope, is to be the end of the world, then somehow everything will be settled. But if this is not the end of the world, then everything will become much worse.”
Can civilizations follow recurrent patterns without making human freedom an illusion? In this 1949 article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi examines Toynbee’s answer, distinguishing his open-ended comparative history from Spengler’s predetermined cycles of decline. He welcomes the displacement of Europe from the centre of historical inquiry and the recognition of multiple civilizations as subjects in their own right. Yet his sympathy sharpens rather than suspends criticism: Toynbee’s religious defence of freedom sits uneasily, he argues, with a mythic account of creation that risks making divine action dependent on a demonic adversary. The article offers a discriminating encounter with Toynbee’s historical imagination, asking how historians can recognize recurring forms, preserve individual agency, and judge their own age without treating it as either history’s culmination or the measure of every other civilization.
Pius IX returned to Rome in April 1850 with his temporal sovereignty restored but dependent on foreign protection. Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s article examines the tension between that diplomatic success and the failure to give promised reforms effective political life. Drawing especially on Austrian diplomatic reports, he complicates the familiar opposition between liberal France and reactionary Austria: both pressed for administrative improvements, while their rivalry constrained the restoration they supported. At the centre stands a pope whose sympathy for Italian independence never displaced his understanding of a universal spiritual office. The dispute over whether a financial council could exercise a binding vote makes the stakes concrete: what diplomats regarded as a modest constitutional concession, Pius came to regard as a threat to papal independence.
In May 1895 Kálnoky could describe Austria-Hungary's foreign relations as orderly while an American envoy judged the monarchy's future exceptionally bleak—and Engel-Janosi shows the two verdicts need not contradict each other. Reconstructing the foreign minister's resignation as a constitutional rather than merely personal crisis, he traces its trigger to the Agliardi affair, in which the papal nuncio's politically charged Hungarian visitation let Premier Bánffy turn a conditional diplomatic protest into a public fait accompli. Behind the rupture lay a structural defect of the 1867 Ausgleich: a common foreign ministry obliged to act for the Dual Monarchy without any command able to restrain Vienna and Budapest at once. Agliardi's later recall partly vindicated Kálnoky, but his fall came as European politics dissolved into a wider world crisis, Russia's gaze turning eastward after Japan's defeat of China.
Zwei Leistungen bestimmen die geschichtliche Rolle des Grafen Kálnoky: seine Politik des Abschlusses und der zweimaligen Erneuerung des Dreibundvertrages und seine Politik gegenüber Rußland, in der die Balkanfrage das Zentralproblem darstellte.
English translation: “Two achievements determine the historical role of Count Kálnoky: his policy of concluding and twice renewing the Triple Alliance treaty, and his policy toward Russia, in which the Balkan question was the central problem.”
Reform could preserve papal sovereignty—or undermine the authority it was meant to strengthen. In this article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi uses diplomatic correspondence from Paris and Vienna to examine that dilemma during the first two years of Pius IX’s pontificate. His comparison complicates a simple opposition between reactionary Austria and liberal France: Metternich advocated administrative improvements, while the French envoy Pellegrino Rossi sought reforms that would secure rather than dissolve papal government. Their differences concerned timing, sovereign rights, and the political meaning of Italian nationality. Following advice through its reception, delay, and eventual displacement by revolution, Engel-Janosi shows how diplomatic influence depended on personal confidence—and why governing as both bishop and king presented difficulties that neither conservative prescription nor liberal optimism could settle.
Austria-Hungary defended the freedom of the papal election of 1878 while secretly preparing to exclude candidates it considered dangerous. Friedrich Engel-Janosi reconstructs this tension from Viennese diplomatic records, including a telegram authorizing a veto against two cardinals loyal to the Habsburg monarchy. Their loyalty, he shows, mattered less than Vienna’s fear of uncompromising church policies and renewed international conflict. The archival discoveries also compel him to revise his own earlier view that Austria had largely neglected preparations for the conclave. This article offers a precise study of intervention conducted under the language of restraint—and of its evidentiary limits: Austria’s satisfaction with Leo XIII’s election does not establish that Austrian diplomacy secured it.
Sharing language, history, and culture with the Reich did not make Austrian resistance a mere province of German opposition to Hitler—so runs the thesis of this deliberately provisional survey. Prompted by the Moscow Declaration's call for Austria to earn its own liberation, Engel-Janosi roots the movement less in fresh ideology than in the will 'to remain what one had been,' a determination uniting monarchists, Catholics, socialists, communists, and anti-Prussian conservatives against absorption. Against the charge that resistance came only once defeat was obvious, he documents cells forming immediately after March 1938, from Tyrol to Vienna, and redefines resistance as cumulative and practical: aid to prisoners' families, intelligence networks, Wehrmacht cells, ingenious economic sabotage, the '05' organization, and finally the battle for Vienna and the rescue of bridges and art treasures from last-ditch destruction.
Auch in Österreich wurde die Saat der politischen und geistigen Erneuerung mit Blut getränkt; wir hoffen, daß sie in diesem Boden umso kräftiger gedeihen werde.
English translation: “In Austria too the seed of political and spiritual renewal was watered with blood; we hope that in this soil it will flourish all the more vigorously.”
Fear built cathedrals and greed built banking houses: across Brooks Adams's Law of Civilisation and Decay runs a single contest between the imaginative type—warrior, saint, priest—and the economic type of merchant, usurer, and financier. Engel-Janosi rescues this neglected American philosophy of history, written before Spengler and Toynbee, from the oblivion it met in optimistic America, reconstructing Adams's formation through the family inheritance, Harvard, Darwin, Spencer, and Guizot. Adams's narrative runs from Rome and Byzantium through the Crusades, Venice, the Reformation, England, and India to modern finance, everywhere charting centralization and the triumph of money power. Engel-Janosi finds the determinism crude beside Max Weber, yet preserves the severity of Adams's question: what governs civilization once belief in progress has collapsed?
Der Titel des geschichtlichen Hauptwerks von Brooks ist Beweis an sich: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.
English translation: “The title of Brooks's principal historical work is proof in itself: The Law of Civilisation and Decay.”
Historicism reaches its fullest force precisely when it dissolves every human form into a historically conditioned object—and at that same moment exposes its own insufficiency, as life, dogma, myth, and an 'Ur'-history press beyond mere appearance. Engel-Janosi stages the argument as a sequence of confrontations: Burckhardt's contemplative culture of remembering against Nietzsche's demand for an art of forgetting; Acton and Döllinger's historical method defeated by dogmatic reasoning at the First Vatican Council; Spengler's biological determinism against Toynbee's refusal to freeze history at the present. As the scale of comparison widens, factual narration yields to myth as a mode of truth, and the overcoming of historicism becomes a search for a history behind history—an ideal eternal history in Vico's sense, closing on Burckhardt's hope of hearing the valley's dissonances as harmony.
Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.
English translation: “Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.”
Could the papacy secure its independence without recovering its lost territories? Friedrich Engel-Janosi examines this question through Benedict XV’s early efforts toward accommodation with Italy, drawing principally on Austrian diplomatic records. Those reports reveal a revealing tension: Austria-Hungary professed support for papal independence yet feared that reconciliation would strengthen Italy and diminish Vienna’s influence. Italy’s entry into the First World War made the problem urgent by restricting the Holy See’s diplomatic relations. Engel-Janosi distinguishes reported papal intentions from confirmed negotiations, tracing possibilities rather than an agreed settlement. His article shows how sovereignty, territorial possession, and international guarantees could become separate questions—and how a Catholic power’s strategic interests could conflict with the freedom it claimed to defend.
Written as prison letters to a daughter, Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History becomes, in Engel-Janosi's reading, a revealing experiment in universal history composed from outside the conventional Western centre. He grants the book's flaws—no developed system, uneven proportion, a heavy tilt toward the modern age—while arguing that its very subjectivity gives it significance: India, China, Islam, and the Mongol world stand contemporaneous with Europe rather than subordinate to it. Nehru's premises mix anti-imperial nationalism, a Marxian account of the distribution of wealth, secular ethical religion, and faith in science and progress, aligning him at points with Wells and Toynbee even as his interest in Asia is lived inheritance rather than detached comparison. The essay presents Glimpses less as a solution to universal history than as a document of world history turning genuinely global.
Von den ungefähr 1000 Textseiten beschäftigen sich 400 mit der Periode seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während die Zeitalter bis zum Ende des Mittelalters mit 240 auskommen müssen.
English translation: “Of the roughly 1,000 pages of text, 400 deal with the period since the First World War, while the epochs down to the end of the Middle Ages have to make do with 240.”