Major review articles cover a wide range, all the way from a book on the Hungarian élite to a discussion of the intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment in remote Scotland and to cognitive science, a new discipline about to take shape.
Mihály Laki is ready to grant that the articles and essays which Erzsébet Szalai has collected in her "The metamorphosis of élites" are imbued with a powerful intuitive talent, a sensitivity to problems and a keen commitment to doing something about social problems. Greater circumspection, however, would have been advisable in the interests of credibility. One may subject the élite to implacable criticism, as Erzsébet Szalai does, one may judge its performance to be poor, heaping on the condemnation, one may accuse it of treason, of merely looking after number one when changing to a market economy, one may accuse it of a lack of solidarity with all those who were being pauperised but, Mihály Laki argues, before doing all that she should have clarified the methodology which led her to such conclusions, defining the term élite in the first place. Her élite can be those who exercise power, but also the culture creators and role models. These may overlap but they may well differ. Such questions have to be clarified before Erzsébet Szalai's arguments can be granted scientific credibility. In Laki's view Erzsébet Szalai's commitment to the Left takes her up the garden path of nostalgia for the terminal stage of Communism.
László Kontler, writing about "The Scottish Enlightenment," a collection of moral philosophy texts, asks himself how a country like 18th century Scotland, there on the NW fringe of European civilisation, was capable of an intellectual performance of which David Hume and Adam Smith were merely the tip of the iceberg. What is instructive, according to Kontler, is that when Scotland had to find her subordinate place within an empire whose motor was trade, something that irritated Scottish traditionalism which saw trade as diminishing the patriotic virtues and the common good, which corrupted, leading to moral decline, this gave rise to a network of intellectual circles where the question was reversed: how could something desirable be hammered out of the undesirable. They did indeed manage to turn what had been blamed, that is the market, into a source of morality.
Compromises achieved as a result of bargaining and debate in the marketplace furthered self-control, tolerance, criticism and self-criticism. The expected profit, like an invisible hand, guided each party to respect the point of view of the other, and towards the common good. Commerce, in every sense of the term, polishes manners, becoming the leaven of public life, civility is a civic virtue and the fount of civilisation which also refers to the state of roads, canals, sewers, workshops and dwellings, not to mention the patronage of the arts, cultivation as such &c. Kontler argues that it is such a spirit that makes something of real changes, which allows a fringe region to set standards.
Bence Nánay discusses a new discipline, cognitive science, its approach, debates, achievements, and those who practise it. Cognitive science is located where philosophy and science march. Its central theme is the operation of the mind and its modelling.
Hungarian history as an exhibit, and the posthumous papers of a great philosopher as the ongoing subject of textual reconstruction are discussed in the Problems section of the current issue.
Ernő Marosi discusses the exhibition arranged by the National Museum on the occasion of the eleven hundred years that have passed since the Hungarian Landtaking from the point of view of an art historian. According to him there is only one aspect which can be unambiguously welcomed, and that is its existence. It is designed as a permanent display which will thus determine for many years how Hungarians visualise their history. It is precisely this that worries Marosi. Confining himself to the Middle Ages and their art, he argues that, when it comes to the origin, function, manifestation, and temporal changes in the decorative arts, the objective culture and the apparel of the Hungarians, individual objects are arranged and displayed in an obsolete and misleading manner. He points out that the exhibition "does not provide a clear picture of the origin of forms." He objects that "Hungarian ornaments manifesting Hungarian religious life" were stereotyped "into some kind of badges of Magyarness." He criticises the copies provided where the originals are not available, art reconstructions and "interior spaces." He choses to doubt that the permanent exhibition will stand the test of time.
Katalin Neumer writes on the fate of the Wittgenstein papers and their publication. The first volumes of a critical edition have only become available forty years after his death. It is testing work, yet the results are doubtful. Wittgenstein's working methods make it almost impossible to find one's way amongst his papers. These include not only notebooks, manuscript bundles, reworked material (not only typescript but also manuscript), clean copies, re-arranged bundles of manuscript synopses, re-arrangements of re-arrangements, notes on slips of paper which he cut up and pasted into various notebooks, manuscripts that have been amended and rewritten, with inclusions, not to mention dictated lecture notes which supplement the above but it is impossible to decide what fits into what. It is not surprising, therefore, that every edition is different. Establishing which is the authentic demands research of its own.
The Notice by many hands deals with Ferenc Szakály's collection of papers and articles: The market town and the Reformation. Its subject is Hungarian urbanisation in the context of a period when the new, the Modern Age, and the old, the Middle Ages, overlapped. Ferenc Kubinyi shows how much in Szakály's work is new, for instance his demonstration that towns existed in zones that were thought to lack them, and that Hungarian entrepreneurs enjoyed a first golden age in the 16th century. Mihály Balázs, however, is not convinced that the 16th century was a Golden Age, albeit he thinks the prosopographies of enterprising burghers a genuine trouvaille. They maintained multiferous commercial contacts with Transylvania, Vienna and trading centres in the Ottoman Empire. Gyula Benda welcomes Szakály's book as something new in Hungarian historiography. The prosopographies help in the reconstruction of processes that had not been known earlier, showing the close connection between the lifestyle of market-town burghers and the ideas of the Reformation. He accepts that entrepreneurship flourished in 16th century Hungary. Vera Bácskai accepts Szakály's new ideas concerning urban development in Hungary which went on in spite of the Turkish wars (contrary to what had beenbelieved earlier) but she is doubtful about the 16th century being a Golden Age. Katalin Péter does not deal with the Golden Age question. She accepts Szakály's work as fruitful but she does not see much sense in discussing the Reformation in the context of the history of market towns, that is of a type of settlement.
The BUKSZ interview is with István Bart who is the Chairman of the Association of Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers. He has much to say about the difficulties which the booktrade is experiencing in a market economy.
The Miscellany section is devoted to the new challenges which environmental protecton has to face, and with the resultant changes it is undergoing.
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