Viktor Orbán, Gyula Tellér, and the open society
The world that György Aczél made
There is a well-known meme — still popular in Germany and other such places — that the year 1989 marked a turning point in Eastern Europe, a trois glorieuses where Liberty led the people across the barricades to a globe-spanning July Monarchy. The pageantry of liberal democracy’s annus mirabilis — the Pan-European Picnic, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Ceaușescu on the balcony — all this seemed to signify the Gdańsk forklift operator and the Donbass miner’s vote of confidence in central bank autonomy, rock music, transformative constitutionalism, Steven Spielberg, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Jürgen Habermas, and the GATT. Party elites, the meme tells us, were nonplussed; caught unawares as civil society swaggered up the ramparts, Inglehartian self-expression values surfed in on a tidal wave of rising living standards, and state socialism appeared to no longer offer anything to offer to youths more interested in the music of David Hasselhoff than the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
As the years drew on and the persistence of the old Party networks in the new democracies became apparent, the dewy-eyed Fukuyamism of the ‘unipolar moment’ dissipated into Kojèvean mysticism. Post-socialist 1990s corruptocracy — so assured us the Annes Applebaum, Edwards Lucas, and Timothies Garton Ash — was merely the temporary, incidental form taken by the World Spirit on its path to itself; shadows to be banished from the cave walls as the independent judiciary imposed the clean, geometrical lines of the Law on the chaos of contingent phenomena, the free press shone its noetic light into the dark corners of unreason, and a new Jerusalem was builded on Freedom House’s green and pleasant world map.
The immediate results were, admittedly, quite remote from this ideal, but this was simply the rough-and-tumble of the Open Society; the checking and balancing, the working-out of values, the contest of arguments — in short, the structural transformation of the democratic public sphere. But 1989 had been a revolution; liberal democracy a new form of government; the 1990s a noble cross to bear — this was the creation myth of the new regime, until Viktor Orbán said good-bye to all that in 2010…
Why did the meme of the ‘democratic public sphere’ and its cognate concepts (such as the ‘open society’) come to dominate Hungarian politics in the 1980s and 1990s? Other post-socialist elites do not require such a legitimating discourse; in the Balkans they will offer much ado about the nation, in Russia the mythos of the FSB, the allure of spy games, and the regime’s supposed mastery of the dark arts are the wares Putin explicitly peddles to the voting public, and in Romania they will simply take your money without even a word about legitimacy. From what spheres did this idea descend… or rather, out of what inner essence did it bubble to the surface? Whence this chiliastic vision of a pure life of the mind; of a democratised ‘order of the just’ declaiming on human rights in the universal cloister of the Open Society? As the Word into the opened mind, so I descend into thy mysteries...
Central to the mythology of the ‘democratic public sphere’ in Hungary was the world of samizdat, and, in particular, the journal Beszélő (which translates to ‘Speaker’, though it can also mean ‘prison visiting hours’). Beszélő was not the first samizdat publication in Hungary, but its early adoption of Polish underground printing techniques allowed it a wider readership than any before it.1 Yet technical competence alone cannot explain the Beszélő’s importance as a Schelling point for anti-political Critique. As one historian writes:
What made Beszélő the most important organ of the democratic opposition was not its independent news coverage nor even its intended effect in providing a mass audience a communication and connection point to the activists. Rather, its critical role lay in the fact that it sought to mobilize both intellectuals and the wider public around a particular program of radical reform. [Beszélő editor] János Kis reasoned that Hungarians would not be converted to the cause through philosophic posturing, but through an elaboration of basic values illustrated by positions taken on the news events of the day and on the possibilities for future reform. This process reached a pinnacle with the 1987 special issue of Beszélő outlining a new program, or ‘Social Contract’.
Beszélő described its programme in the following terms:
Beszélő will speak about events that are outside the ordinary run of things: when people, either on their own or together with others, step out beyond the accepted rules of intercourse between the authorities and the subjects, when they refuse to obey humiliating commands, insist on their rights, and exercise pressure on those above them … We would like to get more information on the motives that inspire people to abandon routine ways of behaviour. We would like to know what measures the authorities take to force people back into the machine-like order of daily routines. How is the conflict between the two sides resolved? How do the bystanders react to the out of the ordinary course of events? We would like to see that these experiences don’t get lost, and that the people who have been, or could be, the protagonists of such events should come to know more about each other.2
Does any of this seem familiar?
A natural comparison offers itself between the broader samizdat world and the picture of the Enlightenment sketched by Reinhart Koselleck in his Critique and Crisis. Koselleck’s basic contention is that, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the private world of moral reflection – a by-product of the Hobbesian social contract, originally functioning as a pressure valve for the absolutist state – evolved into a lobby group challenging the social order through a utopian discourse of Reason. Like the Enlighteners, Beszélő’s grand narrative of an emergent ‘public sphere’ contrasted the arbitrary authority of the party state to a suppressed ‘natural’ logic of human relations; viz., to alternative, spontaneous organisational forms representing the sole arbiter of moral authority and obliviating the need for politics. With its intellectual roots in two local schools of thought (György Lukács’ proto-Frankfurt School Marxism and Tibor Liska’s retro-engineered Austrian economics), both broadly congruous with certain well-known western intellectual trends emergent around the same period, Beszélő’s social critique took the form of a ‘Hayekbermasian’ synthesis under which both social and economic values were to be determined through open exchange in the ‘public sphere’.
Analogous to its Enlightenment forerunner, this Critique’s function was to produce in the minds of its contemporaries the Crisis signalling the end of Party rule in its classical form. In both cases the trick was the same: to cloak the specific, material demands of one elite faction in contest with another in the neutral form of ‘mode of thought’, a set of universal values, a purely normative construct like the ‘open society’ or the ‘democratic public sphere’. No one was actually fooled by this; at least, no one in-the-know and therefore worth fooling — this was a falsification of and for history, directed at as yet unborn generations; an attempt to project one’s own, distinct sensibility into the noosphere for centuries or millennia to come, as Plato and his followers did with Christianity. Practically every elite worthy of the name tries to soothe its troubled consciousness by invoking some set of transcendent values it uniquely embodies. But why this particular discourse?
Out of all the Eastern Bloc countries, it was in Hungary where the romantic notions of an insurgent ‘public sphere’ always bore the most tenuous relationship to reality. This was not Poland: there was no broad-based civil society to check the regime; no battalions of chain-smoking Catholic steelworkers in whose name the bored, rebellious sons and daughters of the Party nomenklatura could pretend to speak. Disgruntlement with living conditions was no less widespread than in our own time, but the regime still enjoyed the people’s tacit vote of confidence: even Beszélő editor János Kis expressed severe reservations about the new electorate’s readiness for democracy.3 In 1989, the Party held all the cards: it was able to handpick its own opposition at the roundtable talks, and in 1990 went into elections firmly convinced that the strength and depth of its patronage networks — not to mention its reputation for strong and stable government in the national interest — would deliver it the day. Nor did the unexpected parliamentary majority for József Antall’s centre-right Baronenkabinett break the Party’s confidence: in 1994, after four years fruitlessly battling the deep state, the blue-bloods were out and the Socialists back in — this time in coalition with the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz), the liberal political party that grew out of the Beszélő milieu.
It had taken the regime no more than four years to effect a reconciliation with its former arch-opponents, the liberal democratic idealists, who now took up key positions in the government, media, the legal profession, and academia. With two brief interludes — Viktor Orbán’s single-term premiership (1998-2002) and the SzDSz’ departure from government in 2008 — this tandem governed Hungary quite snugly until the Socialists were finally unseated in 2010. How could this have happened?
The idea that Beszélő was designated by shadowy forces within the deep state to be the public face of a high-level coup has floated around the Hungarian noosphere for years now. The most dogged exponent of this notion has been the late Gyula Tellér, ‘the Orbán system’s chief ideologue’ according to no less an authority on such matters than Mr. Orbán himself.4 Tellér was no mere conspiracy theorist, no plain-talking below-the-line commentator: a sociologist and literary translator by profession, he belonged to the dissident milieu around Beszélő in the 1980s, and was one of the SzDSz’s founding members.
Tellér believed the mastermind behind the 1980s samizdat scene and the regime change in 1989 to have been György Aczél, the predominant cultural politician of the Kádár years. According to Tellér, the events of 1989 represented a reemergence of ‘those conflicts that, over the past hundred years of Hungary’s societal development, have again and again broken to the service’, with the heavy implication being that these were ethnic conflicts.5
Tellér claimed that no later than 1955, a certain internationally-connected group realised that the Soviet model of socialism was unable to create the type of society they yearned for, and began to look around for alternatives. Two passages from his oeuvre are worth citing at length:
The party leadership tried to save socialism however they could. This was a drawn-out process […] a real drama, where the party attempted the impossible. That group, whose well-informed members could clearly see that socialism was over, had many heirs. These heirs too knew from their fathers and mothers that socialism was finished. There began a very interesting process, the greater part of which can only be inferred in hindsight, for the reason that I simply did not find any of the kinds of memoirs and fragments in which this process would be described in detail. My first inference is that those youths who had seen the Stalinist experiment of their parents fail initially came to the conclusion that their parents had simply built socialism poorly.6
…
The Jewish vs. non-Jewish dimension of this newly forming conflict cannot escape our attention. There was a remarkable number of people of Jewish origin in the Rákosi system’s political, scientific, cultural, and economic leadership […] Kádár, assuming either an insensitivity on the part of the politicians of Jewish origin towards the problems of Hungarian society or that their dislike for and cruelty towards the Hungarian bourgeoisie and peasantry strongly contributed to the outbreak of anti-regime sentiments in 1956, selected his own team predominantly from non-Jews, and, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, ‘withdrew’ many of those of Jewish origin and even those with Jewish names from front-line politics. Reciprocally, the members of those aforementioned ‘reformist’ circles who marched out against the Kádár regime in the 1970s and 1980s, were for the most part definitely of Jewish origin… the ‘Social Contract’ document, whose author belonged to the group I have mentioned, stated ‘Kádár must go!’ — nowhere in this document do we read that Aczél — the only Jew left in the senior Party leadership — must go. The question is how much of this competition and confrontation was spontaneous, and how much was consciously organised. Was there somewhere — whether inside or outside the country — a brain trust that review, analysed, organised, and directed the entire process on behalf of the old SzDSz? […] Why, after the young people had seized power, did Aczél go to Israel? As a tourist?7
(Tellér was a fascinating figure about whom more ought to be said than present space allows for. The characteristic themes of his writings from the 1990s and 2000s — which read like Matthew Goodwin, but with a darker, more cynical sense of humour8 — preempt the ‘populist wave’ of the mid-2010s, and find obvious echoes in Orbán’s later speeches (especially his ‘illiberal democracy’ speech at Tüsványos in 2014). The alleged symbiosis between the Washington Consensus and the ideas of the Frankfurt School (woke capitalism!); the untapped political potential of Hungary’s ‘left behind’; the interplay between sinister, globalist networks and comprador bureaucrats; and the apocalyptic vision of a final electoral contest between the forces of Light and Darkness, followed by the release of Hungary’s spiritual potential in the form of ‘the development of civil society’ — these plutonic harmonies were the Volkspoesie out of which the sound of the 2010s was crafted, elevated to a sonorous, vote-winning hymn by Viktor Orbán’s ‘robustness on comms’. I am not saying that Tellér invented the populist politics of the 2010s (these are elementary deductions that any competent adult could arrive at from a cursory scan of the facts), although a future historiography of our current Vormärz may credit him with this in the way the tumults in Palermo represent der erste Stein in der Mauer in 1848).
We should take Tellér’s claims with a grain of salt. When Stalin set up puppet regimes across Eastern Europe, he did not send his best people — it should not surprise us that early socialist politics did not exactly involve the proletarian Pericles and Ephialtes declaiming in the agora, but rather quickly descended into bureaucratic turf wars between rival ethnic mafias. Tellér is a man of obvious intelligence, but he is not the first disillusioned dissident to see dark forces at work behind his friends’ successful cash-ins. Nor does he forward any evidence for his claims of an international conspiracy: we may dismiss these with a pixellated image of Christopher Hitchens smoking a cigarette emblazoned with some text. But the link he draws between Beszélő and Aczél is more concrete, and gives some clue as to why the form of government adopted by post-socialist Hungary had to be a ‘democratic public sphere’.
A familiar name in Hungary, György Aczél (literally ‘steel’) requires some introduction to a British audience. A former amateur dramatist, Aczél was the kind of rare, Bismarckian political genius whose gift is to handmaiden a revolutionary discourse into an orthodoxy so mundane as to seem predetermined. Orphaned at an early age, Aczél got his political start in the Jewish scouting movement and advanced from there to the illegal Hungarian Communist Party. An old acquaintance of Kádár (with whom he had shared a cell after being caught up in Rákosi’s purges of the late 1940s), Aczél served as Deputy Minister of Culture from 1957 to 1967, elected Secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1967, of which body he was a member from 1970 to 1974 and again from 1982 to 1988, and Deputy Prime Minister of Hungary from 1974 to 1982. Across these various roles, Aczél personally directed the Party’s cultural policy on behalf of the philistine Kádár, in which capacity he ‘orchestrated, quite brilliantly, the score, the players, and the instruments of the cultural scene’.9 A former man of the theatre stage-managing the world of public opinion — one wonders how there hasn’t been an Adam Curtis film about this fellow.
Aczél’s cultural policy centred around the creation of a managed public sphere in which loyalty to the Party guaranteed a degree of expressive freedom. To his underlings in the world of high culture, he deliberately cultivated a Lives of Others façade — as András Bozóki recalls, ‘to those who paid him a visit, [Aczél] would often wink, making it clear that “we have to be careful, because they’re listening to us”’.10 A modicum of intellectual pluralism in the spirit of the Popular Front (the postwar coalition between the communists, social democrats, and the agrarians) was sanctioned, and Aczél’s most palpable coup was the ‘truce’ he negotiated with the old, agrarian populist népi (völkisch) writers (people like Gyula Illyés), thus neutralising a charismatic opponent on the Party’s right flank and reinforcing state socialism’s legitimacy with a firm, nationalist buttress.11
The Party possessed other, blunter means than cultural policy to deal with patriotic dissent, and so the bulk of Aczél’s efforts were directed towards shaping the terrain on the Left. Through his cordial relationship with György Lukács and tolerant stance towards that philosopher’s iconoclastic, literary brand of Marxism, the goulash communism’s eminence grise sought to create a sphere of moderate, left-wing dissent two decades before the first issue of Beszélő went to press. The form this took was the Lukácsian ‘Budapest School’, which, in the early 1960s established a strong presence in Budapest literary life, enjoyed a broad freedom to publish and distribute texts, and received institutional sanction via professorships for its leading representatives at the main Budapest university, ELTE.12 There was a strong degree of intellectual synchronicity and personnel continuity between the ‘Budapest School’ and Beszélő — the journal’s editors, Gábor Demszky, János Kis, and Miklós Haraszti had all passed through the philosophy department at ELTE — such that it would be mistaken to view the two moments as anything other than discrete parts of a whole.
The Budapest School connection is not the only place we see a congruence between Beszélő’s activities and the distinctive aims, means, and tools of Aczél’s cultural policy. Apart from the philosophers, Beszélő’s masthead was drawn from the younger ranks of the Party intelligentsia, many of whom had found employment (i.e., patronage) during the 1970s in the social scientific research institutes established by Kádárite reformers and erstwhile allies of Aczél. As a political form, this think tank network appears surprisingly western — as far as I am aware, it was in Hungary alone amongst the Eastern Bloc countries that these institutes played any autonomous role as pressure groups. Their specific function was Koselleckian, collectively forming as a kind of ‘republic of letters’, a Statthalter for Pure Reason itself, producing scientific studies intended to dazzle the Party’s scientifically illiterate corruptocrats into believing the reformers’ claims to scientific and technocratic legitimacy. It lured potential elites in with its air of bourgeois urbanity and its promise of the vita contemplativa: this was where the smart people congregated to discuss brilliant ideas, and a job in one of the institutes was tantamount to being inducted into the ranks of Elite Human Capital. Beszélő mainstays Demszky, Iván Pető, Tamás Bauer, Bálint Magyar, Ottilia Solt, Gábor Havas, and Erzsébet Szalai all came from this world, although it should also be noted that many of these had, by 1981, been dismissed from their positions in the general Brezhnevite crackdown for their radical opinions.These were members of a youthful counter-elite hand-picked by Aczél’s acolytes to create an alternative socialist ‘public sphere’ that would blend Lukácsian Marxism with a non-dogmatic, technocratic approaches to economics, and this is precisely what Beszélő ended up doing.13
Beszélő’s operations were discrete, but hardly secret, with members of the public able to purchase issues from publisher (and son of a former Interior Minister) László Rajk’s apartment every Tuesday evening.14 Demszky and fellow Beszélő editor Haraszti — were already known to the police for their involvement in a ‘Maoist conspiracy’ in the 1970s (Demszky denies, by the way, having ever been Maoist),15 and yet they still were granted permission travel to Poland in the early 1980s, during which they met with opposition figures. With the exception of a one-day detainment following the turbulent March 15th demonstrations in 1988, the Beszélő editors were never arrested for their activities.
Why did the police not simply throw the book at Beszélő and harass them into exile as they had the members of the ‘Budapest School’ in the 1970s? True, the balance of forces within the Party had clearly shifted by the 1980s, with the Hungarian government’s profligate borrowing in the 1970s and ensuing inability to pay its international creditors forcing the country to turn to the IMF in 1982 and bolstering the Party’s reform wing against the hardliners (thanks, agrarians!). Yet this need not have resulted in a more liberal climate of expression, as contemporaneous events in Poland demonstrated. The Party apparatus had extended its protective hand; the calls for Kádár to go were coming from inside the house. What remains unclear is from who, or to what ends.
The best evidence we have for a conspiracy involving Aczél and Beszélő is in the form of oral testimony. Gyula Tellér claims that András Knopp, deputy head of the Central Committee’s Science, Education, and Culture Department and Aczél’s ‘trouble-shooter for dissident affairs’,16 told him that János Kis was ‘in contact’ with Aczél in the 1980s.17 According to an ‘anonymous former state security official’ cited by the pro-Orbán web portal Pesti Srácok in 2021: ‘in the 1980s our most difficult task was to put the copies [of Beszélő] on Aczél’s desk before the samizdat people [i.e., the Beszélő printers or editors] themselves showed up with the originals. It rarely ever worked’.18
These are vague statements from hostile sources — the most conclusive evidence we have comes from an interview with Aczél published in the journal Köztársaság, and first drawn to my attention by the Pesti Srácok article.19 In the interview, Aczél describes a conversation with the opposition figure Ferenc Donáth in 1983, in which ‘the possibility was raised of an agreement with the opposition. At the time, even Kádár was thinking about this, and only afterwards gave a thought to who would prevent it’.20 The relevant part of the interview, for our purposes, is the following exchange:
QUESTION: From that point on, Beszélő was no longer denigrated as a samizdat journal. It had gained a quiet legality.
ANSWER: Yes. I spoke with Kádár at the time and told him: ‘look’, — and he even accepted this — ‘[…] there never would have been a Rajk affair, if there were Beszélő’.21
No more can be established from this than that, as early as 1983, both Aczél and other Party reformers considered Beszélő a piece that they could use to their advantage. If we believe Knopp’s alleged testimony, the obvious inference is that Aczél was trying to steer Beszélő’s editorial line in a certain direction, although we have no evidence that this actually worked.
(As an aside, Knopp went on to have a rather interesting career after leaving the Party. His first destination was Reemtsma, the German cigarette company with decidedly left-wing sympathies. Later, he became Russian-Ukrainian commodity trader Dmitry Firtash’s Central Europe pointman and served as CEO of the latter’s Eural Trans Gas. In BBC journalist Misha Glenny’s 2009 book McMafia, the story is recounted that Radio Free Europe once published a letter from a senior Russian police official claiming Knopp ran a cigarette smuggling operation for mafia boss Semion Mogilevich; although these dark suspicions were thankfully dispelled when Eutral Trans Gas produced an affidavit from said official denying this).
One might compare Aczél to the physiocrat Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Louis XVI’s finance minister between 1774 and 1776, and an important figure in Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis. Like Aczél in 1957 and 1982, Turgot came to office at the outset of the period when, according to Koselleck, ‘the situation in France sharpened so much that even the burghers themselves could no longer conceal the latent crisis’.22 Similar to the non-doctrinaire Marxist Aczél, with his base in the Budapest intelligentsia, Turgot ‘[was] a typical representative of the bourgeois elite who sought — in cahoots with the [king] — to absorb the state in an indirect manner’,23 and maintained contact with masons, Encyclopédistes, and courtly society alike. His project was to situate the legitimacy of the absolutist state in the moral authority manifest in the ‘public sphere’ — to affect a reconciliation between the Enlighteners and the ancien régime; to fortify the absolute monarchy by invigorating the material order with a new intellectual energy.24 But Turgot was only seeking to instrumentalise an already existing Critique; Aczél — whatever his actual role in the creation of Beszélő — took a more active role in allowing the new Critique to flourish. We can only speculate why.
Turgot’s attempt failed, but his project of conciliation was not, as Koselleck believed, irrevocably buried by the fact of his dismissal.25 As the Hungarian example shows, the discursive invocation of Crisis need not culminate in revolution: the Party’s 1989 convention of its own Estates General allowed the ‘regime change’ to proceed relatively smoothly — a process few could have expected in the tumultuous early 1980s, when Polish military rule offered a vivid example of the lengths the security forces would go to preserve the socialist order. No Abbé Sieyes emerged to fire up the tiers état, the tennis courts of Budapest remained at the sole disposal of the city’s sportsmen, and József Antall’s brief centre-right government — certainly no Committee of Public Safety — folded at the first blast of the taxi horn. Thanks to the new lease of life afforded to it by Aczél’s dexterous cultural policy, the reconstituted Socialist Party governed Hungary in coalition with the SzDSz for the better part of the next two decades. State socialism shed its chrysalis to become the ‘democratic public sphere’; a world in which the Party elite could trade commodities in the morning and criticise after dinner.
It was only in 2010 that, having memory-holed the true history, misunderstood the sources of its preeminence, and failed to adequately plan for its succession, the reconstituted elite was caught off-guard when the Crisis exploded again with a fresh vigour, waking Hungary, once and for all, out of the eternal slumber of the vita contemplativa.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe. Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings, (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), p. 130.
Ibid, pp. 131-132.
Ferenc Laczó, ‘Five Faces of Post-Dissident Hungarian Liberalism. A Study in Agendas, Concepts, and Ambiguities’ in Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989, eds. Michal Kopeček & Piotr Wciślik, (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015), pp. 45-46.
Orbán Viktor, ‘Gyászbeszéd Tellér Gyula temetésén’, kormany.hu, accessed on 02.01.2024 from https://kormany.hu/beszedek-interjuk/miniszterelnok/orban-viktor-gyaszbeszede-teller-gyula-temetesen
Tellér Gyula, Rendszer-e a rendszerváltás rendszere? Vitaindító tézisek a 2009. március 25-i konferenciához, accessed on 06.01.2024 from https://pbk.info.hu/archiv/dl/marcius25/Teller.pdf
Urfi Péter, ‘Még durvább pofon Tokajban — Orbán fő ideológusa kipakolt’, Magyar Narancs, 14.08.2014, accessed on 03.01.2024 from https://magyarnarancs.hu/belpol/orban-fo-ideologusa-kipakolt-tokajban-91366
Tellér Gyula, ‘Középfajú pártdráma — esszé az SZDSZ mivoltáról’, Kuruc.info, 14.02.2010, accessed on 03.01.2024 from https://kuruc.info/r/9/55199/
This is, at least, how it was described by the historian Rudolf Tőkés. Rudolf Tőkés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change, and Political Succession, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16.
Bozóki András, ‘A kultúrmágus. Kegyeltek, bizalmasok és ellenségek Aczél György politikájában’, Hamu és Gyémánt 2 (2010), p. 102.
This had a noteworthy parallel in economic policy, where the most important committees in the planning phase of the 1968 economic reform were given to old representatives of the Smallholders’ Party (the committee on prices was awarded to Béla Csikós-Nagy, interwar Hungary’s foremost exponent of Adam Müller’s economic theories and a Carlsbadian figure whose involvement in the Arrow Cross government somehow did not prevent him from enjoying a high-profile career in academia and the bureaucracy until the late 1980s). It points in the direction of a vindication of Tellér Thought that it was these men — close associates of Aczél — whose policy advice was responsible for Hungary’s spiralling indebtedness in the 1970s.
As László Andor recalls, Ferenc Fehér, a leading figure of the school, was personally close to Aczél. László Andor, ‘Has the dictatorship over needs ended in Eastern Europe?’, LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal, accessed on 05.01.2024 from https://links.org.au/has-dictatorship-over-needs-ended-eastern-europe Cf. Falk, Dilemmas of Dissidence, pp. 122-129.
Like Beszélő, the form that Aczél actually imagined this alternative ‘public sphere’ would take was a highbrow literary magazine; viz., the social science review Valóság (‘Reality’), whose editorial board was a cross-section of Aczél’s most intimate network of loyalists. Operating openly, Valóság was much less radical than Beszélő. Ibid, 108.
Falk, Dilemmas of Dissidence. 130.
Szilárd István Pap, ‘“In the Hot Summer of ’68, We Were the Tempest in the Hungarian Teapot” — The Hungarian Maoist “Plotters”’, LeftEast, 31.08.2018, accessed on 03.01.2024 from https://lefteast.org/hungarian-maoist-plotters/. Demszky, Elveszett szabadság.
Tőkés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution, p. 197
Tellér, ‘Közepfajú pártdráma’.
Mező Gábor, ‘Aczél György már 1983-ban “legalizálta” a Beszélőt — De akkor ki elől menekültek Demszkyék?’, Pesti Srácok, 08.11.2021, accessed on 04.01.2024 from https://pestisracok.hu/aczel-gyorgy-mar-1983-ban-legalizalta-a-beszelot-de-akkor-ki-elol-menekultek-demszkyek/
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, p. 115.
Ibid, p. 116.
Ibid, p. 122.
Ibid, p. 129.