Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1980 (8. évfolyam, 23-26. szám)

1980 / 23-24. szám

cooperatives.’ What he may not realize is that there is an underlying continuity between various fictional modes. As George Konrad observed recently, The novel always return from its stylistic expeditions to the same point, and relates in new ways vary basic, universal parables and fables.’ ”

Sanders’ other recent work is an interview with Konrad, A HUNGARIAN WRITER BETWEEN EAST AND WEST; THE NOVELIST: GEORGE KONRAD, The New Republic 182:1/2 (January 5 & 12, 1980) pp. 24-28. Konrad, who after a twoyear self-exile in the West, returned to Hungary to face the consequences of his essay The Piece Worker, speaks about his world view. He says that “I can’t see self respecting writers belonging to official cultures of any kind.” He believes that “citizens learn to live with the state; the state, which, too, is made up of citizens after all, learns to live with its subjects.” The world of action is more dramatic in Eastern Europe, because of political pressures. Politics in Eastern Europe means that you have an ongoing relationship which you cannot evade. Coming from a bourgeois family, he says that “the intellectual in me picked up where the bourgeois left off.” He says that intellectuals play a significant role in shaping the culture. Interestingly enough, style is for him, what he calls “the ballistic curve of artistic discontent.” He concludes: “There are systems of morality that divide humanity into groups, approving the values of one group and rejecting those of others. Good literature never does this; it sticks up for humankind as well as for the individual human being. It voices, in other words, the morality of understanding.”

The same issue of The New Republic (pp. 28-32) contains a review of George Konrad and Iván Szelényi’s book THE ROAD OF THE INTELLECTUALS TO CLASS POWER: A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA IN SOCIALISM (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 757 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. $10.00) reviewed by Alvin W. Gouldner (Washington U., St. Louis). The reviewer takes issue with the writers, who insist on a Marxist frame of reference when “it was not Marx but his adversary, Bakunin, who was right on these central issues.” He believes that “this may be because East European culture largely censors all social theory except the lifeless ghetto Marxism allowed there.” The authors think that “intellectuals in East Europe are a true ‘class’ and not just some lesser type of social stratum.” □

Horvath, Robert A. “Essays in the History of Political Arithmetics and Smithianism,” Acta Universitatis Szegediesis de Attila József Nominatae: Acta Juridica et Politica, 25:2 (1978).

This issue of the Acta contains six essays by the author, four on political arithmetics and two on Smithianism. Only one, The Development of Political Arithmetics in Hungary (pp. 17-32) is within the scope of HSN. The essay is subtitled a “synthesis,” and it is a summary of Hungarian developments in terms of European trends. The pioneering work of Stephen Hatvani in Debrecen in the 1750s, and later the work of Martin Schwartner in Pest are delineated. The latter’s failure to give political arithmetics a proper place,in his statistical system, as well as the particular considerations (e.g. economic problems of agriculture rather than demography in the case of Paul Magda) by other scholars, hindered the development of this science in Hungary. In the 19th century, the work of Stephen Nyíri, Andrew Fáy,’ and Alex Fenyes in the collection of statistics and the develop-ARTICLES & PAPERS (Continued)

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ment of life-tables proved important, though the problem of insufficient samples and the reliance on foreign models remained. Because of opposition from the churches and lack of cooperation from the authorities, a statistical bureau proposed by HAS in 1861-1863 could not be established until after the Compromise of 1867. It is worth noting that Hungarian political arithmetics furnished both demographic and economic data.

[It is regrettable that the manuscript was not given to a copy editor with appropriate command of English. The awkward grammatical constructions frequently obscure the meaning of the text.]

The author is head of the Department of Statistics, U. of Szeged, and member of the Institut International de Statistique. D

Romanian national myth is the topic of a series of articles written by Attila Kővári, head of the information department of the Isreal Flesearch Institute of Contemporary Society (36 Jaffa Road, P.O. Box 687, Jerusalem, Israel). He was born in Romania in 1929, received his Ph.D. from the U. of Bucharest, and emigrated in 1976. He, together with other emigre' scholars, is researching the problems of Romanian nationalism and socio-politics in Hungary. The Institute publishes Crossroads, a respectable quarterly concerned with social issues.

In the first of three articles, Accident and Necessity in Rumanian Nationalism, Crossroads 2 (Autumn 1978) pp. 216-233, Kővári focuses on Romanian nationalism which is manifest on two levels: in the everyday consciousness of the masses, and in official nationalism as expressed by party and government. Under Ceausescu, nationalism has seen official fanning in three phases: (1) the propaganda poster phase which emphasized historical events presented in broad and bold strokes; (2) the organizational and coordinating phase with aggressive selling and regimentation; and (3) a “fully developed national ecstasy” concerned with gaining scientific justification fortheabove. The Romanian social sciences have been busy to prove a thousand-year-long identification of Romanians with the present territory, and to justify Romanian militancy in defending their national consciousness and norms of social justice. They have also underwritten a drive for a strong centralized power base. Such tendencies need ideological accommodation, and the government has made intensive efforts toward that end. It is unavoidable, therefore, that national policy should coincide with “the chauvinistic tendencies of the Romanian partocracy.”

In the second paper, The Rumanian National Mystery: Myth-Makers under the Microscope, Crossroads 3 (Spring 1979) pp. 201-241, the author analyses the ways a national myth has been created and maintained to “unveil some of the mystery surrounding the mythmaking process, the aim of which is the glorification of the Rumanian ethnic community.” In order to accomplish this task, the concept of nationalism had to be legitimized as an intrinsic part of the ideological frame of reference. The author says that heraldry would be a more fitting definition than historical science for the functional meaning of current research in the fields of ethnic and national evolution in Romania. Science is summoned to provide impeccable genealogical roots for Romanians with ancestors of honorable and unblemished reputation. “To shine the coat of arms until it glitters is to refine the story through ornamentation.” Thus, “contem-NO. 23-24, SPRING, 1980, HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER