Modern Hungarian Society In The Making

Illuminates the problems connected with Hungary's transition to a civil society while providing insights into the development of political culture and the rise of civil and national consequences.

This book looks at the problems connected with the modernization of a Central European state and its development from a feudal to a civil society. Using the history of Hungary over the last 150 years as a model, the author sheds light on political, social and economic trends in the region as a whole.

This fascinating book tells the story of modern Hungarian society through the interconnected lives of several families in a small town on the Great Hungarian Plain. It opens in 1989 - on the eve of communism's collapse - with the suicide of the town's dynamic and popular mayor. The author quickly sketches in the details of the small scandal that precipitated the mayor's shocking act. Amazingly enough, this small scandal in a small town became a sensation in the Hungarian national press during the months leading up to the fall of the regime. It was seen to typify the corruption of national life under the communist system. Following this prologue, each of the three parts of the book tells the story of one of the families over the course of the last century - and, through that family history, the story of one of the social groups making up the community. The ups and downs of each family are tied not only to the strengths and weaknesses of its individual members, but also to the twists and turns of East European history and the vagaries of politics under changing political regimes and economic systems. At the end of the book, the author revisits the town (in 1998) and the surviving characters, and tells of their fate in the new Hungary.

'A magnum opus, an accessible and genuinely global history ... This is a book for today and tomorrow' Financial Times Capitalist enterprise has existed in some form since ancient times, but the globalization and dominance of capitalism as a system began in the 1860s when, in different forms and supported by different political forces, states all over the world developed their modern political frameworks: the unifications of Italy and Germany, the establishment of a republic in France, the elimination of slavery in the American south, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the emancipation of the serfs in Tsarist Russia. This book magnificently explores how, after the upheavals of industrialisation, a truly global capitalism followed. For the first time in the history of humanity, there was a social system able to provide a high level of consumption for the majority of those who lived within its bounds. Today, capitalism dominates the world. With wide-ranging scholarship, Donald Sassoon analyses the impact of capitalism on the histories of many different states, and how it creates winners and losers by constantly innovating. This chronic instability, he writes, 'is the foundation of its advance, not a fault in the system or an incidental by-product'. And it is this instability, this constant churn, which produces the anxious triumph of his title. To control or alleviate such anxieties it was necessary to create a national community, if necessary with colonial adventures, to develop a welfare state, to intervene in the market economy, and to protect it from foreign competition. Capitalists needed a state to discipline them, to nurture them, and to sacrifice a few to save the rest: a state overseeing the war of all against all. Vigorous, argumentative, surprising and constantly stimulating, The Anxious Triumph gives a fresh perspective on all these questions and on its era. It is a masterpiece by one of Britain's most engaging and wide-ranging historians.

This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in various European contexts between 1600 and 1815. Contributors challenge the dichotomy between modernists and traditionalists in nationalism studies through an emphasis on continuity rather than ruptures in the shaping of European nations in the period, while also offering an overview of current debates in the field and case studies on a number of topics, including literature, historiography, and cartography.

This comprehensive study traces the history of over forty royal free towns from the sixteenth-century to 1848 in the territories of what today are Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. Szelényi argues that these towns have been a neglected feature of national meta-narratives in Eastern Europe because their dwellers were often German speakers.