Tudomány és intézményei
Tibor Schwendtner: Who Invented the Humboldtian University? The Debate about the So-Called Humboldt Myth
During the transformation of European universities by the Bologna Process, intense debate was sparked off about the role of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the founding of the Berlin University and the question whether a Humboldtian Model can even be said to exist. The leitmotif of the debate is the Humboldt Myth, based on the idea that Humboldt’s role in the founding of the Berlin University was very limited, and his significance is a construct created by twentieth- century philosophers and university policy-makers who were closely associated to the current politics and university policy struggles of their age. The present study selects two questions from the complex branches of this multifarious debate, both of which concern the institutionalization of philosophical thought. The first one deals with the role of the philosophical ideas in the founding of the university. Here the author focuses on the activities of Humboldt himself, who was well acquainted with the relevant views and ideas of his contemporaries and was able to appropriate and apply them in a productive way. Second, the study raises the question whether the concept of myth is suitable for the interpretation of Humboldt's reception. Representatives of the Humboldt Myth thesis often fail to distinguish between various forms of Humboldt reception. This is why it is necessary to clarify the typical manifestations of the twentieth-century reception of Humboldt’s university-related activities. The study identifies five distinctive types of Humboldt reception and concludes that only a few of these can be labelled as a myth, and even then, to a limited extent. Finally, the study argues that the debate about the Humboldt Myth fits in the context of the conflicts triggered by the transformation of European universities. The key principles behind these universities’ managerist transformation from the 1980s onwards are in diametric opposition with the Humboldtian university concept, which is the reason why the debate about the Humboldt Myth became an integral part of conceptual struggles surrounding the future of European universities.
Mátyás Erdélyi: The Oriental Academy of Commerce and the Orientalists: The Interplay between Academics, Economics and Politics
The case study of the Oriental Course of Commerce (1891–1899) and the Oriental Academy of Commerce (1899–1919) provides an apt terrain to examine the relationship between learning, economics and society. The Oriental Academy served as an institutional centre for the early practice and teaching of orientalism. Ignác Kúnos was a long-serving head of the institution, the ethnography and commercial geography of the East was taught by Adolf Strausz, the history of Eastern peoples by Ede Mahler, and Gyula Germanus was the instructor of Turkish and Arabic. The official function of the academy was to “provide theoretical and, where possible, practical training in skills necessary for trade with the Orient” – that is, practical business training – but was also inherently intertwined with the concept of ‘orientalism’ described by Edward Said. The Oriental Academy, however, is a case which also highlights some shortcomings in Said’s argument since learning – albeit an active component in national culture, political conflicts and social inequality – follows its own logic here. The institutional strategy of the Academy is interpreted in this conceptual framework: the Eastern scholarships received by the students and their reports, the creation and dissemination of applied knowledge (e.g. Oriental Phraseology published for field hospitals operating in the Balkans, and other guidebooks) or the Oriental Museum inaugurated in 1913, must all be analysed as integral parts of Hungarian orientalism. The function, content and disciplinary boundaries of orientalist studies were a result of a complicated process, organically bound to the logic of scholarship, as well as to a project of professionalization (the creation of a Hungarian trading class), the concept of commercial expansion, and the myth of cultural colonization. Thus, the present study examines who decided what was professionally acceptable and culturally legitimized in the field of early orientalist studies.
Eszter Őze: Social Museum: The Institution for Social and Health Education
The study explores the cultural history of museums of health sciences and education founded at the beginning of the twentieth century – after the 1851 World Exhibition – more specifically, the institutional position and integrating function of the Social Museum (later Museum of Public Health) between 1901 and 1945. The museum was founded by the minister of commerce in Budapest in 1901 to foster emancipatory work through exhibitions about public health and workers’ advocacy. This Hungarian institution operated as part of an international network, which also included the German Soziales Museum and the French Museé Sociale. The distinguishing feature of the Hungarian museum was that it focused on the moral, political and medical education of a single social class – the workers. During its forty-year operation, it extended its remit to the presentation of industrial health, workers’ health protection, the ‘social and health education of the people’, the dissemination of social sentiment and the ‘clarification of the questions of genetic transmission’. This museum is a unique representation of the history of early twentieth-century public health, as well as of the relationship between state, industrial capitalism and the urban proletariat. The study examines the reasons behind choosing museums as the tool for the integration and representation of workers, and places the Social Museum in the context of the history of late nineteenth-century museums, primarily in comparison with the ideals behind the most important representational medium of the time, the World Exhibition. The examination of the world expositions and the museum as a later development is significant because the representation of economic power at the beginning of the nineteenth century brought about the representation of the body, lifestyle and problems of the workers. In this way, at the end of the nineteenth century the emergence of the cheap labour of industrial workers contributed to a turn in museum history that was at least as significant as the public appearance of the museums themselves: the represented content was extended to the lower classes, who thus entered the museum space not only as spectators, but as exhibits.
Vera Szabari: The Social and Political Environment of Institutionalizing Hungarian Sociology in the 1960s
Throughout the history of Hungarian sociology, there have been many attempts to build a robust institutional network, and the most successful one, whose institutional framework remains definitive to this date, took place in the 1960s and 1970s. It was around this time when the first academic research group – later Research Institute for Sociology – was launched, followed by the first university departments, scholarly journals and learned societies. After the 1956 revolution, the institutionalization of sociology was tied to the Kádár Era consolidation in the 1960s, which undoubtedly carried the promise of increased independence of the subsystems of society, the depolitization of everyday life, and of satisfying the society’s need of consumerism and modernization. Such efforts in Hungary, as part of the Soviet Empire, were deeply impacted by global power alignment and legitimization struggles, which, from the 1950s onwards, increasingly shifted to the scientific domains of economy and technology. The study focuses on the antecedents, founding, and operation of the Sociology Research Unit at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences after 1963, then its eventual institutionalization in 1968. The aim of the study is to find out what role the contemporary reform efforts played in the process of institutionalization and the legitimization of sociology as a discipline. How was the professionalization of sociology viewed and by whom, what arguments helped or hampered the representatives of the discipline within academia and the political regime or from a social perspective in the broadest sense? The study also examines the ways in which the modernization ideology adopted by the state influenced the knowledge production of sociology: picking the questions to be debated and selecting the research methodologies as well as individual and institutional research strategies.
András Szécsényi: The László Rajk College of Karl Marx University of Economics in the Intersection of Tradition and Training the Socialist Elite (1970–1988)
In September 1970, a new institution was launched within Hungary’s Karl Marx University of Economics, Budapest. The Rajk College, initiated by assistant professor Attila Chikán and endorsed by the rector, Kálmán Szabó, was then entirely unique in the country. It filled gaps as a college for advanced studies and, to some extent, was a successor of the people’s colleges operating during and after the Second World War. It did, however, remain to be seen at the time that the college, riding the waves of the New Economic Mechanism, was to become the programme for the elite and the gifted and that it would continue to represent political economic approaches that dissented from party dogma and could be construed as Western even after the failure of the Mechanism. This made it popular among talented and ambitious students who later became economic policymakers and corporate leaders. At the same time, the college never broke away from the economic and political trends dictated by the Hungarian Socialist People’s Party, so its role in training future cadres remained significant. In any case, breaking away was never an option, since the university operated as the main institution of training communist cadres for the party. The study uses documents of self-perception from institutional archives and narrative sources to examine the college’s communal, societal and professional role – the quasi-motto of the college – before the 1989 changes. Mapping the changes in their content, the study explores the role of the college in the life of the young university intelligentsia of 1980s Hungary.
Imre Tarafás: The Man with Qualities Meets the Man Without Qualities: Cultural Transfer and Conflict of Historiographical Approaches in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century
The starting point for the study is the Hungarian translation of Alfons Huber’s Geschichte Österreichs, which, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was not only translated but also heavily edited by omitting the parts discussing the history of Hungary and by other structural changes. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, the study presents the translation to shed light on larger questions behind the episode. Examining the productive field of the original text, he discusses the contemporary dilemmas of ‘Austrian’ identity through the concepts of Österreich and Österreicher, and presents an overview of the ideological programme prevailing in Austrian historiography at the time. Concerning the field of appropriation, he continues with the contemporary practice of Hungarian translators and the reception of the original text by Huber. Finally, the study analyses the final translated version of the text, highlighting the intended and unintentional implications of the changes made to the text.
Zoltán Cora: Social Policy in Hungary and the Loss and Consolidation of Assets of the Social Security System between 1945 and 1947
Comparing the development of social policy between the years before and after the Second World War is as important a historical question in Hungary as in other countries. Although researching the welfare state has progressed greatly in recent times, there are fields that remain unexplored. For example, findings have not been synthesized into any scholarly consensus – or any debate even – about a comprehensive overview of social policy in the transition period from the end of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1950s, which includes the divide between the two periods under scrutiny here. The Second World War had an immense impact on the assets that provided the basis of Hungarian social policy and social security. Extending the inquiry to the losses suffered in the Second World War, the study examines the development of the financial conditions of Hungarian social policy and social security during the years of stabilization and rebuilding the economy (1945–1947), primarily focusing on the loss of assets and building a financial basis. Food shortage, economic difficulties, unemployment, hyper-inflation, and the hindrance or discontinuation of social support due to the loss of assets as well as poor coordination all contributed to the extremely low standard of life in the post-war years – not limited to certain social groups (e.g. old-age pensioners) but the thrusting the whole society into deep deprivation. While health and accident insurance were relaunched on the back of state loans, the pension system – primarily because of the complete erosion of reserve funds – adapted the pay-as-you-go format. Extending access to family support schemes and veteran support were important measures, although they provided fertile grounds for nascent political discrimination. By the beginning of 1947, the financial stabilization allowed more opportunities for the Hungarian welfare state. The hypothesis of the study is that despite the growth of social security coverage and the extension of access to services, both the lack of financial stability and the destruction of significant assets rendered Hungarian social policy practically dysfunctional, even after some successful stabilizing – and later, reconstructive – measures. This was further aggravated by the largely unsuccessful attempts to repatriate social security funds from territories reannexed between 1938 and 1941, then permanently lost after 1945. Thus, social policy in Hungary had little room to maneuver and only the most basic services could be guaranteed. Asset reparations yielded the first results only after 1947.
Könyvek