What is (a) Hungarian? Reloaded – after Seventy-eight Years

This essay, the genre of which is scientific prose, offers a historically embedded birds-eye-view-analysis about the long term transformation of Hungarian society. Following the process sociological approach of Norbert Elias, the author intends to reconstruct the main characteristics of the persistently recurring macro-structural institutions, habitus patterns, life strategies (social practices) and symbolic representations that condition the political climate and the everyday life from the Middle Ages to the 21th century. It is pointed out that the nobility and the peasantry are over-represented in Hungarian society, thus national identity and “national genius” are generally defined against the modernising efforts of enlightened absolutist rulers and urban middle classes of mainly foreign origin.

Released: Replika 105, 209–227.