REPORTS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE
MARIA M. KOVACS
Hungary
Back in the 1970s two prominent Hungarian intellectuals, George Kon–
rad and Ivan Szelenyi wrote a book entitled,
The Road
of
the Intelligentsia
to Class Power.
A few days after they finished the manuscript, they were
arrested by the police and expelled from the country without legal
proceedings.
One and a half decades later, the Communist
nomenklatura
that ar–
rested Konrad and Szelenyi has altogether disappeared from the public
eye. Hungary's current president, Arpad G5ncz, is a fiction writer, and
the prime minister is an historian of medicine who spent most of his life
working in a museum. The foreign minister, the minister of defense, and
the speaker of the house are
all
professors of history. It is no exaggera–
tion to say that today's Hungary is led by a government of historians.
Most leaders of the largest opposition party are also academics,
though mainly not of history but of economics, philosophy, and
sociology. In any event, it is safe to say that the majority of those in the
political class are intellectuals in the classical sense - they are precisely the
kind of people whose rise to "class power" Konrad and Szelenyi had
predicted at the cost of their own imprisonment and expulsion back in
the 1970s.
But at least one of the two authors - George Konrad - is not self–
congratulatory about his past predictive powers. On the contrary, he has
come to rethink his theory. He now considers the rise of the intellectuals
no more than a transient episode in the long process of transition from
communism to a new political structure:
Although in the new democracies the most conspicuous actors on the
political stage are writers, professors . . . and historians, I do not
Editor's Note: Maria Kovacs's essay was first presented as a talk at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars on June 20, 1991.
