Societatea rurală transilvăneană în tranziţia spre modernitate, în lumina legislaţiei austriece din perioada neoabsolutistă, 1849-1859

Transylvanian Rural Society in Transition Towards Modernity, Seen in the Light of Austrian Legislation During Neo-Absolutism 1849-1859. The Forty-Eight Revolution in the Habsburg Empire and the following neo-absolutist decade were the turning point of the Transylvanian society's transition to modernity. At least in the 5th-6th decades of the 19th century, the main agency of modernization was the state, who attempted at modernizing the society through laws and institutions which had a decisive impact upon it. The legislative work of the Austrian neo-absolutist regime had a direct and immediate impact on the rural society. Modernization was first felt at the economic level and laid the foundations of new types of relations in which modern economic practices prevailed more and more. Among the challenges of modernity the most important was the land reform of 1854, which marked the transition to modern legal forms concerning property relations. In the neo-absolutist decade, we also witness the crystallization of a discourse on the Transylvanian village and its progress towards modernization, which sketches an ambivalent picture with a positive and a negative dimension, depending on the promoters of the discourse, as well as on the most diverse local realities.