Karl Mannheim and Hungarian Marxism

Joseph Gabel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351316620
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This remarkable work situates the great Karl Mannheim not only in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but in Hungary and especially in the intellectual fever pitch of pre-war Budapest, with its plethora of revisionist Marxists, anarchists, and intellectuals from a variety of areas who brought radical ideas into the mainstream of biological and social sciences. As Gabel reminds us, Budapest provided a special environment in which the cross-currents of Europe met, and was uniquely devoid of the xenophobia and militarism of so many other parts of Europe.

The volume serves as a useful introduction to the force and character of Marxism in Central Europe. Gabel covers not only key figures but major concepts associated with Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge: ideology and false consciousness; the socially unattached intelligentsia; and the utopian conscience. In addition, we are given a tour of the work of Mannheim as seen in Germany, France and England. Gabel's has a unique mastery of the major languages of Europe, and this gives him the potential for a reinterpretation of Mannheim that reveals the author to be a talented thinker in his own right, and not simply a chronicler of the work of others. His final chapter on Mannheim, comparing him with Lukacs as well as Marx, is central to our understanding of sociology.

In raising the importance of the role of consciousness in the study of society, Mannheim overcame what Marx and Engels, no less than many of his followers understood to be an essential weakness in the so-called economic interpretation of history. This book, linking Mannheim to the Hungarian climate, helps us appreciate how this sociological synthesis came about in a specific social setting.

Joseph Gabel was born in Hungary, and educated in French universities. He is the author of False Consciousness (1962); Sociology of Alienation (1970); Ideologies, Vol. I (1974); Ideologies II (1978), all in French. His book on The Forms of Estrangement (1964) was published in German. His shorter articles have appeared in Kolner Zeitschrift for Soziologie und Sozial-psychologie, and the Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge.

PART I

Hungarian Marxism

1

The Socio-Historical Context of Hungarian Marxism

The success of G. Lukàcs in the postwar period brought Hungarian Marxist thought into the limelight. Its representative thinkers suffered the same fate as all Hungarian intellectuals, forced to choose between linguistic isolation from the rest of the world by writing in Hungarian or separation from the national community through use of a world wide language. One reason the school of thought which, on the model of “Austro-Marxism” I choose to call “Hungaro-Marxism,”¹ took so long to become established as an independent school is this paradoxical linguistic and cultural situation.

Are we entitled to classify Mannheim —who, though born in Budapest, was soon integrated into German university life —among the members of this school? The answer to this question depends to a large extent on one's definition of “school.” I think that a current of ideas can lay claim to the status of a “school” if it offers one or more major permanent themes, provided that “comprehensive relations” (as defined by Max Weber) can be established between that thematic permanence and the socio-historical context. This sort of “gnoseo-sociological deduction” is generally painstaking. Goldmann managed it for Jansenism. We shall try to do the same for the Hungarian Marxist school, whose demystifying tendencies, according to our hypothesis, are rooted in the geographical and ideological centrality of Hungary— and Budapest, in particular —during the period from the historic compromise with the Hapsburgs in 1867 up to the Second World War. Since the various forms of collective egocentricity —sociocentricity , ethnocentricity, Eurocentricity — are factors of ideological distortion, the centrality of a given socio-historical context can help produce nonideological, demystifying awareness. On the whole that is one of Mannheim's oft-quoted —and often misunderstood —theories concerning the demystifying role of the rootless Intelligentsia applied on a collective scale. From that point of view, prewar Hungary — Budapest, in particular —was in a truly exceptional situation. The multilingual, cosmopolitan atmosphere of urban milieus; the paradoxical situation of Hungarian nationalism, torn between monarchist loyalism and nostalgia for independence; the religious dualism; the divorce between the official intellectual life and counterculture; the gap between the capital city and provinces: all of these decentralizing factors favored the rise of a “Marxism of démystification” illustrated by such theorists as Lukàcs, Fogarasi, and Szende as well as Mannheim, whose work is the main object of my present essay.

To understand Marxism's appeal to certain strata of the Hungarian Intelligentsia in the first half of the twentieth century, it is important to bear in mind the fact that Hungarian intellectual life had never produced a great national doctrine in philosophy or sociology comparable to Durkheimianism in France or Hegelianism in Germany. That would not mean much in a country with poor or barren intellectual life, however in the sophisticated cultural milieu of the Hungarian capital city, it was meaningful in that it enhanced the chances of Marxism. A young intellectual of the belle epoque (before the First World War) who, in quest of a scientific understanding of social reality, would have turned to Durkheimianism in France, might very well have become a Marxist in Hungary.

Another important historical fact was the divorce between the official academic culture and the left-wing intellectual life. This split appeared some decades after the historical “compromise of 1867”;² it was the dominant trait of Hungarian intellectual life until the Second World War. This phenomenon is typical of semi-authoritarian societies: totalitarian governments will not stand for the existence of an intellectual counterculture, and in democratic countries there is no need for it. I should like to underline the specifically Hungarian nature of this cultural dualism; in Romania for example, this phenomenon was less evident in spite of a similarity in the degree of public freedom in these two countries.

The destinies of the Hungarian psychoanalytic school offer a good example of this cultural dualism. With theorists such as, among many others, Sàndor Ferenczi, Géza Roheim, and Imre Hermann, the psychoanalytic movement of Budapest was, beyond doubt, one of the most important in the world. Despite that fact, there was never any question of granting Ferenczi or Roheim any kind of professorship.³ In fact public authorities did nothing to interfere with the practice of psychoanalysis or the publication of its findings, but Academia was adamant in ignoring them. None of Ferenczi's or Roheim's young compatriots would have dreamt of submitting a Ph.D. thesis on a psychoanalytic topic at Budapest University. In such a context even well-to-do analysts, despite a brilliant social and material situation, would appear as intellectual marginals (freischwebend); this was especially true after 1920, when psychoanalysis began to attract Jewish medical practicioners who, being barred from major teaching posts, had nothing to lose. The convergence of these various factors resulted in the emergence of a sui generis gnoseo-sociological environment in which issues such as Marxist-psychoanalytical relations, or the dialectical aspect of the Freudian theories, were analyzed at an early stage.⁴

It would of course be an exaggeration to speak of a policy of intellectual coercion in prewar Hungary; the Horthy regime to a large extent respected intellectual freedom. But the Hungarian university of that time was a closed paternalistic world, which, at least in the social sciences, discarded all forms of modernity (this statement does not hold true for the medical and technical departments). For a young Hungarian of that time, being a Marxist in the theoretical field did not amount to a death sentence, even in the figurative sense of the term, but it certainly meant exclusion from the academic life. Access to higher learning was free until 1920, when the sinister numerus clausus law was imposed on the Jewish minority, causing an irretrievable brain drain. Academic recruitment had always been based on religious and political conformism. From the very beginning of his studies, the future intellectual was aware of the dilemma: either be a conformist and end up as university professor, or write in unofficial journals, acquire notoriety without official status, and live by one's fortune, pen or clientele. In the long run this situation produced a profound split between official and progressive intellectual life. I must add that, at least in the humanities, the latter attracted the most valuable elements. Marxism was naturally in the forefront of this alternative counterculture; the fact that its adherents were banned from higher teaching functions contributed to the emphasis of its antidogmatic attitude. This trend was to survive after the “Liberation of 1945” and create some difficulties for the left-wing authoritarianism succeeding to the right-wing one.

The isolation of the capital city from the rest of the country reinforced that tendency. It is a rule that the capital is never the country, but nowhere was this contrast between the two more striking than in Hungary. To get an idea of the gap between the profoundly westernized, high-strung, agitated, somewhat decadent capital, an incomparable center of art and culture, and the stagnant waters of the province, imagine New York or Boston moved to the middle of Nevada or to the Midwest, for example. The revolutions of 1918 and 1919 largely reflected the revolt of Budapest against the province; Admiral Horthy's counterrevolution in 1920 was a highly conscious act of retaliation against “Judapest,” the cosmopolitan and supposedly anti-patriotic capital.⁵ Even in the most reactionary moments of Hungarian history, Budapest managed to preserve some freedom of expression —the preliminary condition of an intellectual life which remained brilliant even in the stuffy political climate under Horthy. Less than fifty miles from the brilliant, modern, and open-minded capital-city was the borderline of an archaic social world.

The theme of “Hungarian alienation”⁶ —a vague feeling of fatality or of malediction⁷ —is expressed with a remarkable vigor by the poet Endre (Andrew) Ady, one of the giants of Hungarian —and of world — literature. The Hungarian people are in the center of Europe, isolated from the surrounding peoples and languages. Their country is located on the historical crossroad of invasions, its history is a tragic one —a long series of unsuccessful revolutions⁸ and interminable periods of foreign occupation. “We remained virgins on the heroic wedding bed of revolutions” exclaimed Ady on the eve of the democratic Revolution of October 1918 (the “Asters Revolution”). Ady saw the fiasco of that revolution but died before he could witness the failure of the Communist experiment of Béla Kun in 1919. It is possible that the spectacle of this tragic series of aborted revolutions helped to sensitize certain representatives of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, such as Madâch, Mannheim, and Kolnai, to the problem of utopia. A collective feeling of solitude and failure can bring about diametrically opposed results depending on the general level of political awareness. At a primitive level, such a feeling may give rise to a certain openness to right-wing-extremist ideologies.⁹ In a sophisticated intellectual context— as is generally the case with intellectuals of Central Europe —it can, on the contrary, help people to understand the problem of alienation. I see here one of the gnoseo-sociological reasons for the distinctive character of Hungarian Marxism.

Two other important factors converge with the preceding ones as instruments of decentration: the paradoxical situation of Hungarian nationalism and the religious dualism.

In France, at least since 1789, there has been a solid link between the leftist attitude and the patriotic spirit. The Front Populaire, for example, was at the same time both a leftist and a patriotic movement. In Hungary, at least until the thirties, nothing similar appeared. In this steadfastly nationalistic country, nationalism was between 1867 and 1918 in a paradoxical situation. After the compromise of 1867, a “liberal party” came to govern the country. It was a traditional nationalist party that had no qualms about using chauvinistic language on occasion, but whose loyalist stance toward the Hapsburgs had quisling overtones that did not escape the public eye. The oppositional “Kossuth party,” whose demands for total independence corresponded to “dyed in the wool” patriotism, could not reject, in the long run, the alliance with the Social-Democracy, whose uncompromising internationalism sometimes included overtly anti-patriotic overtones.¹⁰ Hungarian nationalism at this time was torn between two opposite poles, both of which had a discrete flavor of antinationalism or, at the very least, “a-nationalism.” Now it is well known —at least since Bacon and the Novum Organum — that idols of the tribe (i.e. collective ego-centricity) are a powerful force in ideologization. Caught between these contradictory tendencies of Hungarian nationalism at this time, certain elements of the urban population were in a favorable position to transcend the “idols of the tribe” and corollary forms of false consciousness, such as ethnocentrism and eurocentrism, to name a few.

We find an analogous situation in the field of the religious experience. Hungary belongs to a minority of European countries with no truly dominant religion; Catholic and Protestant influences balance each other. Catholicism is the religion of the Hapsburg monarchy and of the majority of the population, but Protestantism is that of an important sector of the Hungarian power elite. Moreover, Hungarian Protestantism is historically linked with the idea of national independence which for centuries meant a battle against Catholic Austria. The Hungarian collective subconscious therefore lacked a system of universally recognized religious dogmas, which in countries with a single religion shapes even sceptical minds. Like the ambiguous nature of Hungarian nationalism, religious dualism promoted in certain milieus relativistic (and thus demystifying) forms of sociological thinking. When throughout the centuries one half of a population brands the other as heretics, that obviously creates an intellectual climate favorable to transcending religious alienation as such.

These factors were particularly influential in certains intellectual milieus of Budapest, which were drawn to Marxism because of the lack of a great national doctrine in philosophy or sociology. The result was a form of Marxism basically antidogmatic and dialectical, even relativistic, with some idealistic trend, to the extent that the primacy of dialectics over materialism implies such an orientation. Moreover this “Hungaro-Marxism” was above all eclectic. The Galilean Circle (Galilei kör) was at this time (before the First World War) the principal organ of progressivism among the students of Budapest. Its masonic origins did not prevent it from propounding Marxism and at the same time the philosophy of Ernst Mach, a thinker appreciated in Austro-Marxist circles but notoriously shunned by orthodox (soviet) Marxists. Béla Fogarasi who will become one of the most important personalities of Hungarian Academia after 1945, translated Bergson, another thinker unjustly ostracized by the Marxian orthodoxy. The author of the Données Immédiates de la Conscience influenced Lukàcs and indirectly, through Sorel, the outstanding Hungarian theorist of revolutionary syndicalism, Erwin Szabó. The first truly well-informed Hungarian specialist of Bergson, Valerie Dienes, was also a member of the Galilean Circle. Bergsonism, often branded in France as reactionary, was adequately perceived by a large sector of the progressive milieu of Budapest as a dialectical doctrine of de-alienation. The same holds true for Durkheimianism whose latent kinship to historical materialism was diagnosed in Hungary at a very early stage.¹¹ These examples illustrate the high degree of cultural openness and the ability of the Hungarian Intelligentsia at this time to synthesize. In that cosmopolitan milieu, open to every influence, resolutely anti-sectarian, and heedless of taboos, the problems of alienation, ideology, utopia, and even those of false consciousness naturally came to play an important role, not only in philosophy but in literature as well.

Let us consider two examples from opposite poles of this period, the first of which shows the early stage at which these themes took root in the Hungarian intellectual life and the second the tenacity of these roots. In 1860 the poet Emeric Madàch published his “Tragedy of Man,” a grandiose philosophical poem concerned with the subjects of alienation and utopia.¹² Nearly a century later —at the zenith of Stalinism —a study of the Marxist philosopher George Nàdor was published under the title Contemporary sophistry. A contribution to the logical analysis of the fallacious thinking of the Bourgeoisie in the imperialist era.¹³ This essay is a genuine critical analysis of a form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• dedication
• Preface
• Part I: Hungarian Marxism
• 1. The Socio-Historical Context of Hungarian Marxism
• 2. Three Representative Figures: Erwin Szabo, Paul Szende, and Bela Fogarasi
• 3. Hungarian Marxism after 1920
• Part II: Karl Mannheim
• 4. Mannheim and the French Public: The Controversy over Ideology and Utopia
• 5. Ideology and False Consciousness
• 6. The Problem of the “Socially Unattached Intelligentsia”
• 7. Mannheim’s Second Period (Writings in Emigration)
• 8. Utopian Consciousness
• 9. Critique of Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge
• 10. Socially Determined Thought and Historical Materialism: Mannheim and Marxism
• Bibliography