Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Socialist democracy appeared in the theory of democracy as an eminently non-western form of democracy in the period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The concept of socialist democracy based on the theses that can differentiate socialist democracy from liberal or parliamentarian democracy: (1) the unity of the power of the proletariat, led by its vanguard political force of the communists, and (2) the setting of the framework of democratic decision-making in the field of labor. Socialist democracy was indeed a form of directed democracy beyond that it had systemic aspirations to create an alternative socio-economic model. This article aims to trace the historical-semantic formation of socialist democracy and discuss its main institutions in the years of post-totalitarian socialist Hungary between 1956 and 1989. What is remarkable in the case of Hungary is that the development of socialist democracy was accompanied by economic reforms to the planned economy from the first half of the 1960s. Thus, socialist democracy focused on the democratization and institutional system of the workplace, mainly as factory democracy and cooperative democracy. With the liberalization and capitalization of socialist economy in the eighties, however, these forms failed to manage the problems of economic incentives and social atomization.

AbstractIn the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter‐concept to set against 'bourgeois nationalism' which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra‐nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid‐1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.

A fél évszázada berobbant olajválság alaposan megváltoztatta a világ gazdasági, ugyanakkor politikai viszonyait is. A válságos nak nevezett hetvenes évtized ekkor került valóban mély válságba, strukturális átalakulásokat kényszerítve ki a nyugati gazdaságokban, illetve a globális gazdasági kapcsolatokban.

In political theory, the criticism of Rawlsian constructivist liberalism has been articulated intheories of political realism. John Gray, one of the promoters of realist liberalism, recommendsa neo-Hobbesian way of social coexistence which is based on the conflictual and antagonisticidea of political life. It takes social values and forms of life as incommensurable in modernmulticultural societies. Taking value-pluralism and its conflicts seriously, a theory of modusvivendi has been articulated among realist political thinkers. Being a post-liberal (or post-Enlightenment) theory, modus vivendi is more a practice oriented and open-ended theory thanphilosophical constructions based on high morality. Modus vivendi theorists make an emphasison the peaceful co-existence of social groups and a moral minimum of the political society. One ofthe deficiency of the theory is that it says not much about democracy, though it would be highlyuseful according to two contextual considerations.On the one hand, a modern political systemwould be impossible or outrageous without any form of democratic legitimacy. On the otherhand, there is an exhaustion of the liberal project(s) and the societies featured by multiculturalprosperity. Besides constitutional protection, defending democracy in this new context meansbalancing between cultural and other value-oriented groups in modern societies. In my paper,I make an attempt to examine the concept of democracy in the light of modus vivendi theory.