Anton Tomaž Linhart (Radovljica 1756 – Ljubljana 1795), Slovenian man of letters, was born in a middle-class family of Moravian origin, attended the Jesuit gymnasium in Ljubljana, and from 1780 pursued a career as public official; he became registrar of Ljubljana district in 1783, and in this position undertook various initiatives towards the improvement of public culture. Upon his suggestion, a public scholarly library was founded in Ljubljana in 1791; he instigated the founding of grammar schools in Carniola and attempted the establishment of university studies there.

Linhart was the foremost writer in Carniola at the end of 18th century. His rationalist outlook reflected influences from Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire; politically, he followed the line of Josephinism. His commitment to his native Slovenian culture followed, accordingly, the lines of Enlightenment Patriotism; he attempted to improve his country’s cultural standing by writing (in German). In 1781 he published a collection of poems, Blumen aus Krain, inspired by Metastasio, Pope, and Ossian. In the same year he participated in the renewal of the dormant scholarly Academia operosorum in Ljubljana, originally established in 1701.

In 1781, Linhart joined the intellectual circle of Žiga Zois; under Zois’s influence he turned from the German language to the use of Slovenian. Under the title Županova Micka (“Mayor’s Mary”) he arranged and staged with huge success Richter’s comedy Die Feldmühle in 1789; in 1790 he wrote and published a comedy, Ta veseli dan ali Matiček se ženi (“The merry day or Matthew’s marriage”), along the lines of Beaumarchais’s Le marriage de Figaro (which remained unstaged because of tightening censorship).

In 1788-91 Linhart published, with Zois’s support, the work that was to become the cornerstone of subsequent Slovenian cultural nationalism: Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain und den übrigen Ländern der südlichen Slaven Oesterreichs. In these two volumes he dealt with the history of the Slavs in Inner Austria (Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, Gorizia, Istria, and Trieste) up to the reign of Charlemagne. The treatment followed modern rationalistic history and was modelled upon the works of Johann Christoph Adelung, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and Karl Gottlob von Anton.

Linhart was the first historian to present the Slovenians, dispersed over various provinces, as a single ethnic group (albeit as part of the wider Slavic nation), and to present their history, centred around Carinthia, as a unified whole. His theory of an ancient Slavic settlement in Carinthia was later adopted by Jernej Kopitar, who augmented it with a hypothesis about the Pannonian origin of Old Church Slavonic. In the same work, Linhart also laid the foundation of Austro-Slavism by emphasizing the importance of the Slavs to the Habsburg Monarchy and hailing the Illyrian Court Chancellery (established by Emperor Leopold II in 1791 for the Serbs under the Hungarian Crown) as an embryonic form of Slavic statehood under Habsburg auspices. These tendencies, too, were taken over and augmented by Kopitar.