Concepts of Politics in Modern Hungarian Thought

Ferenc Hörcher is a historian of political thought and political philosopher. He is head of the Research Institute of Politics and Government of Ludovika University of Public Service, Hungary, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy, HUN-REN. He is a senior fellow at the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom. He is a member of the editorial board of Politeja, Krakow. He is co-editor, along with Thomas Lorman, of A History of the Hungarian Constitution (Bloomsbury, 2018) and with Kálmán Tóth, of 19th-Century Hungarian Political Thought and Culture: Towards Settlement with Austria, 1790-1867 (Bloomsbury, 2023).Ádám Smrcz is a philosopher and intellectual historian. He is research fellow at the Research Institute of Politics and Government of Ludovika University of Public Service, Hungary, and teaches at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. He has published on Justus Lipsius and neo-Stoicism, Francisco Suárez and natural law, the economic thought of Adam Smith and David Hume and on Tocqueville, among others, in scholarly journals. He is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Ruch Filozoficzny.

• Acknowledgements List of Contributors1. Concepts of Politics in Modern Hungarian Political Thought (16th-20th century), Ferenc Hörcher2. Unity and division - Diverging concepts of nation in Hungarian political thought at the turn of 16th and 17th centuries, Gábor Petneházi3. The Transition from Machiavellianism to the Paradigm of Rational Self-Interest in the Hungarian History of Political Ideas, Ádám Smrcz4. The meaning of “political” in the discourse of political religions: Hungary in the long nineteenth century, Tamás Nyirkos5. The Limits of Estates Politics: Lessons from a Debate in the Hungarian Diet of 1825-27, Ágoston Nagy6.“Politics” and “Polizey” in the Kingdom of Hungary at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries – A Study in Conceptual History, Henrik Honich 7. The Political Community in the Political Thinking of István Gorove, Kálmán Tóth8. Aspects of the “Political” in Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travel Writing in the Hungarian Reform Era, Márta Pellérdi9. Political Liberty in Gyozo Concha’s Thought in Light of Montesquieu’s Concept of Freedom for the Citizens, Eszter Kovács10. Politics as a “science of society”. Pál Hunfalvy’s reflections on the theory and practice of politics before the suppression of the revolution of 1848–1849, László L. Lajtai11. The Concept of Politics in Hungarian Political Science Textbooks (1848-1945), Kálmán Pócza and Botond Jereb12.Aurel Kolnai and the Concept of the Political, Zoltan Balazs13.Humanized Power, anti-politics, and the morality of Human Rights. Liberal reconstructions of politics in late socialist Hungary, Milán Pap 14.Epilogue, Ferenc Hörcher and Ádám Smrcz15. Key ConceptsBibliographyIndex

In this tightly woven collection of thematic essays, the authors trace the moderate pragmatic tradition in Hungarian political thought since the sixteenth century. By means of twelve original case studies, the writers demonstrate how a practical approach to politics may be combined with the pursuit of ideals.