Estates and Constitution

Across eighteenth-century Europe, political power resided overwhelmingly with absolute monarchs, with notable exceptions including the much-studied British Parliament as well as the frequently overlooked Hungarian Diet, which placed serious constraints on royal power and broadened opportunities for political participation. Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during this period, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, putting its historical significance in international perspective.

István M. Szijártó is Professor of History at Eötvös University, Budapest. He has published several books about the social and cultural history of politics in 18th-century Hungary as well as the theoretical and methodological problems surrounding microhistory.

“The wonderful contribution of this work is exactly what it wanted to accomplish: to inspire historians to get into the archives and uncover the microhistories of many different sources of power. This book is a breath of fresh air in the study of eighteenth-century Hungarian history, and I strongly recommend it.” • Journal of Modern History

“This study is packed with useful information, insights, and findings… Both student and scholar will find this rich account of Hungarian and Habsburg politics essential reading.” • International Journal of Parliamentary Studies

“Szijártó’s outstanding monograph offers an admirable example of a work of scholarship on complex problems in the somewhat ‘exotic’ history of early modern East Central Europe which both conforms to the local (in this case, the Hungarian) historiographical tradition and meets the standards of the Anglophone academic world.” • Hungarian Historical Review

“The Hungarian Diet has been grievously neglected in international scholarship. Szijártó’s study will completely transform that landscape. It demonstrates how and why the country's parliamentary system proved one of the most effective restraints on absolute monarchy and its centralizing policies in 18th-century Europe.” • Robert Evans, University of Oxford

“This is a major work of original research on an important subject, one that is regrettably little known or examined in Anglophone scholarship.” • William D. Godsey, Austrian Academy of Sciences