Intellectuals and Democratisation in Hungary

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

This chapter analyses the political rôle of the Hungarian critical intelligentsia in the recent past and after the change of system, employing the methodology applied by Konrád and Szelényi in Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979). Here, the critical intelligentsia is the group of intellectuals who are related to existing authority first and foremost on an ethical-normative basis. Konrád and Szelényi describe the intelligentsia as a schizophrenic actor, characterized equally by “telos” and “techné”, by teleology and rational knowledge (1989, 31-9); for the first time in history there has emerged a social actor with the opportunity to organize itself into a class and, with the development of bolshevism, to ascend to power and not only to figure as an estate (as in pre-capitalist societies) or a stratum (as in market societies). Konrád and Szelényi defined the intelligentsia as the owners of transcontextual knowledge, knowledge independent of situations, who legitimize given social status exclusively by their knowledge. Thus when we speak here of the critical intelligentsia, we mean a group of intellectuals who reflect upon political conditions from a moral-universal perspective.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSocial change and political transformation
EditorsChris Rootes, Howard H Davis
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherUniversity College London (UCL)
Pages149-175
Number of pages27
ISBN (Print)9781857281484
StatePublished - 1994

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