Concepts of Politics in Modern Hungarian Thought

Ferenc Hörcher, Ádám Smrcz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781350513945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book presents an overview of the concepts of 'politics' and of 'the political' in Hungary since 1526. Through a detailed methodological introduction and eleven case studies, Concepts of Politics in Modern Hungarian Thought examines various approaches taken at different turning points in the history of Hungary. The book surveys the evolution of thought on the subject, from the 16th century, when Hungary was partly under Ottoman, and partly under Habsburg rule, through the period of the dualist Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, after the Austro-Hungarian Settlement of 1867, up to the period of the Communist regime of the second half of the 20th century.

Bringing together perspectives from intellectual historians, legal scholars, political philosophers and even historians of economic thought, this volume provides insights both into the political ideas of important but lesser-known Hungarian authors, and into the nature of the challenges the political community had to cope with. It deepens understanding of what was meant by the concept of 'the political' in different periods whilst providing a clearer picture of the shifts and continuities in Hungarian political thought and culture over the last five centuries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Concepts of politics in modern Hungarian political thought (sixteenth–twentieth centuries)
• 2 Unity and division: Diverging concepts of nation in Hungarian political thought at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
• 3 The transition from Machiavellianism to the paradigm of rational self-interest in the Hungarian history of political ideas
• 4 The meaning of ‘political’ in the discourse of political religions: Hungary in the long nineteenth century
• 5 The limits of estates politics: Lessons from a debate in the Hungarian Diet of 1825–7
• 6 ‘Politics’ and ‘Polizey’ in the Kingdom of Hungary at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a study in conceptual history
• 7 The political community in the political thinking of István Gorove
• 8 Aspects of the ‘political’ in Polixéna Wesselényi’s travel writing in the Hungarian Reform Era
• 9 Political liberty in Győző Concha’s thought in light of Montesquieu’s concept of freedom for the citizens
• 10 Politics as a ‘science of society’. Pál Hunfalvy’s reflections on the theory and practice of politics before the suppression of the revolution of 1848–9
• 11 The concept of politics in Hungarian political science textbooks (1848–1945)
• 12 Aurel Kolnai and the concept of the political
• 13 Humanized power, anti-politics and the morality of human rights: Liberal reconstructions of politics in late socialist Hungary
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index