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Practicing “Europe”: Georg Lukács, Ágnes Heller, and the Budapest School

Emilia Palonen, 2017

Exploring the cases of the two generations of Budapest School, Georg Lukács and Ágnes Heller as

transnational intellectuals, this chapter investigates from a post-foundational perspective the

articulation of Europe through practices. What emerges in this investigation is Europe both imagined

and physical, divided and asymmetrical. Crucially, it comes about through its own limits. Taking

issue with two left-wing theorists recently demonised in Hungary, the chapter also discusses how

national, Europan and global are intertwined and the simple opposition of national and cosmopolitan

that sometimes has been assumed does not hold. Budapest School, emigrating from Hungary in the

1970s is established as a conscious effort globally. Here the role of Ferenc Fehér and Ivan Szelényi,

in particular, were crucial for en emergence of the School as an international node for Western

Marxist theory from the East, challenged the division of East and West during the Cold War era. The

chapter invites us to reflect upon the conscious strategies of academic branding, power structures,

and personal experience of getting possibilities of crossing frontiers, and asymmetries that continue

having positive and negative impact in the European and global academic life: generating alternative

centres of knowledge but also impeding free exploration of new worlds.

Georg Lukács, Ágnes Heller, Ivan Szelényi, Budapest School, intellectuals, Europe

Introduction

In Eastern Central Europe intellectuals are often seen as national heroes, although their role may be

much more regional or global.1 Cast in stone or frozen in iron they appear as statues in the street

scapes appearing fixed even if the ways in which they became intellectuals or heroes implied a sense

of dynamic and interaction. The experience and practices of Hungarian intellectuals often also outside

of Europe or on its limits generated Europe and the national. This chapter treats Europe both as a

continent of interaction and as imagined or referred to space of interaction.2 From the perspective

adopted here, Europe has no foundational identity of its own but gains it through discursive

productions, and through what is not, the constitutive outside, the limit-space, or the margins. Rather

than taking Europe for granted as the physical ground in these activities, this chapter argues from a

1 András Bozoki, ed., Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). 2 See e.g. Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Stråth, eds. Meaning of Europe, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), Benoît

Challand and Chiara Bottici, Imagining Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Claudia Wiesner and

Meike Schmitdt-Gleim eds. The Meanings of Europe: The Changes and Exchanges of a Contested Concept (New York:

Routledge, 2014).

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postfoundational perspective3 that “Europe” is articulated in the practices intellectuals engage.4 It

explores ways in which physical and imagined character of European intellectual space intertwine

and how “Europe” is entangled with the national and the global. Global dimensions emerge from the

local and national conflicts and dilemmas. The practices of engagement and intellectual and physical

moves within space, first, suggest that the European and the national are intertwined, and, second,

afford meanings to “Europe”, and, third, generate the articulations of “Europe” through intellectual

practices and even self-branding by intellectuals and global academic politics, which are also worth

reflecting from the contemporary perspective.

In Eastern Europe and manifestly in Hungary, each government or political era establishes its

own canon of intellectuals, and there may be alternative and competing sets.5 Some who stay are

deconstested and mythicized. But even as political figures they are powerful myths that carry

expressions of nationhood.6 There would be many famous Hungarian intellectuals and émigrés to

choose from, ―artists, inventors, intellectuals, scientists, and even politicians and sportsmen―,

canonized and politicized both globally and at home. This chapter addresses two figures who have

been recently politicised in their home country. The powerholders in Hungary and Budapest branding

their politics as “illiberal democracy” have sought to distanciate itself from any socialist, Marxist, or

post-Marxist intellectuals, as the recent removal of the Georg Lukács and the country’s first

president’s Mihály Károlyi’s statue from Budapest show.7 From the early 2010s, repatriated Ágnes

Heller has been the counterpoint of the Orbán government, strengthened by her media presence in

the West. Rather than engaging with what they theorised about, this chapter explores the fluid and

networked nature of their intellectual being.

3 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau:

Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 4 In this chapter I draw on the theory of hegemony and poststructuralist discourse theoretical approach developed by

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Instead of taking meanings for granted, they discuss the ways in which meanings

are assigned, through relation and substitution. Their theory also demonstrate that although meanings appear fixed, it is a

political process to assign, maintain and contest their meanings. Discourse theory has been associated with speech and

writing, but meaning making is also carried through practices. Hence, in this chapter the focus is on practices articulating

Europe rather than representations of “Europe”, what it is most commonly tied to. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). Earlier I have engaged with both – the articulation and the

policies of the “EU” Europe, see Emilia Palonen, “Assigning Meaning to (EU-) Europe Through Cultural Policy”, in the

Meanings of Europe: Changes and Exchanges of a Contested Concept, ed. Claudia Wiesner and Meike Schmitdt-Gleim

(New York: Routledge, 2014), 144–159. 5 Who are the national heroes are an important battle where intellectuals of different periods of history are referred to. On

Hungarian canons on street names see e.g. Emilia Palonen, “The Politics of Street Names: Local, National, Transnational

Budapest”, in Local Memories in a Nationalizing and Globalizing World, ed. Marnix Beyen and Brecht Desseure

(London: Palgrave 2015): 51–71. 6 E.g. George Schöfplin, Nations, Identity, Power (London: Hurst et co, 2002). 7 There would be a long canon of Hungarian scholars like Karl Polányi, Karl Mannheim, Georg Lukács, or the Budapest

School Ágnes Heller, Mihály Varga, and György Markus, and its next generation of György Konrad and Iván Szelényi,

who have made their mark on the Left internationally.

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Contesting the politicised contradiction between cosmpolitans and nationals prevalent in

Hungary, this chapter also shows how these left-wing intellectuals were also national in their activity

and self-perception, even while that national got entangled with European, global or international.

Thseir stories are more universal than one might think. Many theorists irrespective of their political

orientation were shaped by the experience of Hungarian Stalinism and the failed 1956 Hungarian

revolution.8 In this way these parochial and local seeming events have had global influence through

the theories produced.

This chapter’s cases presented as narratives reveals a dimension of strategies and actions

shaped it in multiple generations. The first case of Georg Lukács shows the way in which Europe is

shaped as an intellectual space of interaction that appears bipolar but in fact its borders are more fluid,

and the second case investigates the collectivity of Budapest School, mainly through one of its

members: Ágnes Heller. The cases discusses the division of Europe into two, yet where was no

“Europe” in singular, and even Marxist thought was divided into multiple traits. Curiously, although

the Hungarian Budapest School was on the Eastern side of the “Iron Curtain”, their thought belongs

to the Western canon.

The final part of the chapter raises issues that are rarely accounted for in biographies of great

men, that is, the practical side of emigration and working on an asymmetry as a tool for intellectual

endeavor. The case Heller addresses the emigration of the Budapest school. It was a

counterhegemonic project in Hungarian intellectual history: a conscious effort by Lukács and his

younger colleagues to challenge the status quo at home and introduce a new node in the Western

Marxist network. The articulation of Budapest School shaped the history of left-wing thought.

While Lukács and Heller’s thought has been discussed by many scholars, 9 this chapter

discusses intellectuals’ strategies and how they, rather than their thought, shaped “Europe” as an

intellectual space. Lukács argued that his thought was shaped by his previous experiences and

contacts. Heller explains in her memoirs that her path to Marxism was through Lukács, which implied

quite a different version than the official Stalinist version.10 Heller has made a distinction between

8 Biographer of John Kadvany argues over the émigré intellectual Imre Lakatos, who succeeded Karl Popper as the

Editor of British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, his that reading Lakatos is analogues to reading Lukács’ History

and Class Consciousness. John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the guises of reason (Durham and London: Duke

University Press, 2001). The coinciding with particular events in Hungarian past has been stressed also in Budapest

School’s Ferenc Fehér’s obituary. Köves, Margit. "Ferenc Fehér (1933-1994), Reflections on a Member of the Lukacs

School." Social Scientist 23, no. 4/6 (1995): 98-107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3520217. 9 On Heller see: John Burnheim, ed. The Social Philosophy of Agnes Heller, (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994); Katie

Terezakis, ed., Engaging Ágnes Heller (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009); John Grumley, Agnes Heller: Moralist in the

Vortex of History, (London: Pluto Press 2005); Simon Tormey, Agnes Heller: Socialism, autonomy and the postmodern,

(Manchester: Manchester University Press 2001). 10 Georg Lukacs “Preface to the New Edition (1967)”, in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1968): xi-xiii. Ágnes Heller and János Kőbanyai, Bicikliző majom (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő: 1999.

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her philosophical and social life,11 yet she has made public her private life through her memoirs,

where these get entangled. If her boyfriend and later husband István Hermann brought Heller to the

lectures of the philosopher Georg Lukács, it was her first husband Ferenc Fehér, a fellow Budapest

School scholar, who maintained it. Product of what we would now call transnational scientific

branding, the Budapest school may have become more of an ethos of thinking than a life-and-flesh

close-knit community of truth shaping European intellectual space.

The European Jewish, Marxist intellectual: Georg Lukács

In the nineteenth century, borders in Central and Eastern Europe under the Russian and Austro-

Hungarian empires were fluid and individuals, unless tied to the land, moved between cities and

ethnic communities, up to the First World War. Feeling at home arrested this flow, for the individuals,

and in the larger context this fluidity changed during the twentieth century. The borderlessness was

still present for German-speaking Hungarian intellectuals such as Georg Lukács who moved between

cultural centers of the period, Berlin, Vienna, and Heidelberg, Florence and something that the

biographers have chosen to call “Scandinavia” ––until he was called to Moscow to make sure he kept

the hegemonic communist line. His story also reveals how communism was a transnational activity

with a hub in (Red) Vienna both as response to Soviet developments and emergence of nationalist-

authoritarian movements in the region. During the Soviet dominated period, Moscow emerged as an

important center but also established hegemonic dichotomies, whereas Western Marxism emerged as

something that divided West and East also in socialist theory ―and Lukács as a communist and

“Western Marxist” chose to remain in the East finally in Hungary until his death.

Lukács’s travels and relocations demonstrate that for those who could afford it and are

interested in moving from one side of Europe to another on an intellectual quest was possible. “My

greatest happiness will come when I am known as the father of György Lukács”, the sponsoring father

stated in a letter, while providing support for Lukács’s literary aspirations rather urging him to make

a living.12 Deak accounts how “following his graduation in 1902, Lukács went to Scandinavia, there

to meet with Henrik Ibsen, his literary idol.”13 Evoking something of a singular Scandinavia and

literary idols that were travelled to. Lukács made a study tour of Florence in 1912, and then moved

to Heidelberg. He read Marx as a sociologist through Simmel and Weber, got to know Kierkegaard

11 Laura Boella, “Agnes Heller’s Philosophical Life”, Revue internationale de philosophie, 273 (2015): 321–331. 12 Quoted in Joseph B. Maier, “Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School”, in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and

Politics, ed. Judit Marcus and Zoltan Tarr (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction 1989), 53–61, 57. 13 István Deák, “The Convert”, The New York Review of Books, March 12 (1987),

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/03/12/the-convert/.

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and Hegel, and later Rosa Luxembourg, which he accounts for having shaped his early thought. He

befriended Simmel in Berlin (1906–10) and in 1913 Weber and Ernst Bloch in Heidelberg. This

borderless Europe shaped the way in which Lukács and his students saw Europe.

Getting familiar with the German sociological circles, particularly Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg

Simmer, Max Weber, and despite his attraction to the German university system, Georg (in Hungarian

György) Lukács can be seen as an outsider, a Hungarian Jew among the Lutheran protestants, and

perhaps because of this position found a critical angle on this work as Harry Liebersohn argues.14

The situation in Hungary may have been different. Going through biographical writings of Lukács,

István Deák questions previous contentions that Hungary Jewish people become outsiders, only

finding their national identity on exile or rejecting Hungarian values: Georg Lukács’s father was not

an outsider and he used his connections to get his son Georg declared unfit for duty and later

dismissed from his duty in military censorship office during the First World War.15

It is also difficult to categorise early Lukács. The Lukács’s late biographer Arpad Kadarkay’s

vivid reading demonstrates the different life phases following the early 1900s trends.16 He engaged

in processes that were deeply political in the formation of literary and cultural elites in Hungary.

Lukács lead the Sunday Circle that united transnationally famous avant-garde figures such as Karl

Mannheim, Béla Bartok, Béla Balász, and Karl Polányi. They were challenging the status quo, and

became well known in their criticism. His entanglement with the national and the transnational and

the interplay between the Russian and German, East and West makes him an interesting figure. “The

wartime quest for community, the fascination with Russia, and the commitment to communism led

Lukács to the discovery of a collectivist work ethic, one that, he believed, transcended the antinomies

of German sociology,” Liebersohn explains.17 His attempts at university career and habilitation in

Germany, however, failed even depite faculty members including Weber, Gothein, and Rikert

campaigning for him in 1918.18

Lukács was torn between his desires: for activism and for philosophy. The Sunday circle

broke at the end of the First World War, and Lukács ended up in the newly formed Communist Party

of Hungary. He became a revolutionary of the failed 1919 Peoples Republic of Hungary. He accounts

14 Harry Liebersohn, “Lukács and the Concept of Work in German Sociology”, in Judit Marcus and Zoltan Tarr, Georg

Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics (Transaction: New Brunswick and Oxford 1989), 63–71, 64 15 Deák, Convert; Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation: 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1985), Lee Congdon, The Young Lukács (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). See also more generally

on Hungarian intellectuals of the region: Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany

and Austria, 1919-1933, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 16 Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 17 Liebersohn, Lukács, 71. 18 Judit Marcus and Zoltan Tarr, “Introduction”, in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, eds. Judit Marcus and

Zoltan Tarr (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction, 1989), 3.

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for how they had different views even in the party, and how he read deeper Lenin’s work only after

having immigrating to Vienna after the collapse of Soviet Republic, 1 August 1919. After he was

arrested by Austrians in in October, “the intervention of Thomas Mann and other eminent German

literary men” contributed to his early release.19 It became a period of study, Lukács recalls, as the

revolutionary workers’ movement in Hungary needed new slogans and policies to “survive and

expand during the White Terror,” refute slanders of dictatorship, and at the same time engage in self-

criticism of the proletarian dictatorship.

In addition, we in Vienna found ourselves swept along by the current of the international

revolutionary movement. The Hungarian emigration was perhaps the most numerous and the

most divided at the time, but it was by no means the only one. There were many émigrés from

Poland and the Balkans living in Vienna either temporarily or permanently. Moreover, Vienna

was an international transit point, so that we were in continuous contact with German, French,

Italian, and other Communists. In such circumstances it is not surprising that a magazine

called Communism was founded which for a time became a focal point for the ultra-left

currents in the Third International. Together with Austrian Communists, Hungarian and

Polish emigrants, who provided the inner core and the permanent membership, there were

also sympathizers from the Italian ultra-left, like Bordiga and Terracini, and Dutch

Communists like Pannekoek and Roland Holst. 20

Lukács accounts how Lenin provided criticism to his emergent sectarianism and messianic

socialism. In History of Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács presented a dialectical theory that

undercut the stale dispute between materialists and spiritualists, Engels and Hegel. Lichtheim writes:

“His standpoint could be summarized by saying that materialism and spiritualism are the thesis and

antithesis of a debate which has its origin in a failure to overcome the cleavage between subject and

object. The solution lies not in opting for one or the other, but in transcending the area of dispute, and

this can be done by following Marx in treating practice as the concrete union of thought and reality.”21

He developed his thought and participated in debates both in the Hungarian Communist Party and

Europe, and grew frustrated about the Third International, which was influenced by Stalinist tactics.

Lukács describes:

“Around 1928, [Stalin] described the Social Democrats as the “twin brothers” of the Fascists.

This put an end to all prospects of a United Front on the left. Although I was on Stalin’s side

on the central issue of Russia, I was deeply repelled by his attitude here. However, it did

nothing to retard my gradual disenchantment with the ultra-left tendencies of my early

revolutionary years as most of the left-wing groupings in the European parties were Trotskyite

―a position which I always rejected.”22

19 Deak, Convert, see also, Judit Marcus Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature,

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 20 Lukacs, “Preface”, xi–xiii. 21 George Lichtheim, George Lukács, ed. Frank Kermode (Viking, 1970), 60, quoted in Deak 1987. 22 Lukács, “Preface”, xxii–xxix.

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He sought in vain “for a ‘genuine’ left-wing programme that would provide a third alternative

to the opposing factions in Germany,” and did not publish internationally.23 He took part in politics

in Hungary, where his tactics had made it possible to establish a Workers Party with the support of

the left of the social democrats in 1924–25, illegally lead by the banned communists. This strategy

was similar to the Lenin’s people’s dictatorship in 1905 when workers and peasants joined ―but it

was seen as retrograde, given that Hungary had already, albeit shortly, been a Soviet republic in 1919.

Béla Kun, the leader of the 1919 revolution, was high up on the ranks of the International, and on the

other side to Lukács. Lukács claims that he wrote his ‘Self-Criticism’ refuting his earlier tactics, to

maintain a position within the party also internationally, and to be able to criticize fascism, which

was palpable in Horthy’s Hungary. Privately he thought that it was best to withdraw from a political

career and focus on theory.24

While Lukács became a tamed but potentially controversial figure. He was summoned or

“comminterned” to Moscow in 1930, when the Austrians refused to extend his allowance. Lukács

tried to resist this by signing up at a surgery. Finally in March Lukács and his wife Gertrud travelled

to Moscow as a temporary visit leaving their (or Gertrud’s) sons in Vienna where they were being

educated, and daughter Anna to Lukács’s sister in Bratislava. According to his biographer Arpad

Kadarkay, the philosopher did not know many people in Moscow, appart from the Hungarian

emigrées.25 Apparently, “the Russians never really liked Lukács. Of course it never bothered him”,

Kadarkay quotes a Hungarian contemporary.26 Lukács was assigned to work at the Marx-Engels

institute with David Riazanov working on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, by

Marx and Engels, which Riazanov had collected from the London Press Archive.27 Moscow was a

hostile place for intellectuals. The former Soviet People’s Commissar for Education and once the

most powerful grand old man of literary and philosophy circles Anatoly Lunacharsky was one of the

figures Lukács knew but he was now marginalized and was not fond of Lukács’s philosophy although

sympathized his politics, but Lukács befriended his secretary Igor Satz.28

Riazanov was neither a fan of Lukács, but ended up suffering as a prominent victim of the

Great Terror in Stalin’s Russia: strong on his own stance he was expulsed from the project and later

executed. The denial of Hungarian literature in the Hungarian proletarian writers’ caucus in Moscow

was a remarkable way of contesting the national heritage for universalist one.29 Lukács escaped

23 Lukács, “Preface”, xxii–xxix. 24 Lukács, “Preface”, xxii–xxix. 25 Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 299. 26 Béla Balász’s wive Anna, in Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: 300. 27 Lukács, “Preface”, xxii–xxix. 28 Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 300. 29 Kadarkay, Georg Lukács, 303, 343.

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Riazanov’s fate, invited to speak in an international revolutionary writers’ congress in Berlin in 1931,

the same year that also Mikhail Lifshitz, he worked with, moved to Berlin.30 Lukács was careful

enough to later refute Riazanov, as well as renounce his own work History and Class Consciousness

in yearly in 1932–1934. To Russia Lukács returned only in 1933, after Hitler’s seizure of power. He

focused on literary criticism and Hegel, and “considered himself ‘lucky’ in that he was arrested only

in 1941 when the executions had stopped”, surviving the purges.31 In 1945, he returned to Budapest

to teach aesthetics and cultural philosophy, becoming a member of the Hungarian Academy of

Sciences in 1948, just at the time of the state socialist rule was establishing. Yet, he had an uneasy

relationship with the ruling ideology.

In the 1950s, Lukács sought to challenge Stalinism in Hungary and was taking part in the

Petőfi Circle. During the revolution of 1956, he was the minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s short lived

government. The revolution was intellectually reflected and an attempt to make an alternative

socialism disconnected from the Soviet model to Western Marxism where Lukács had made a heavy

contribution already in 1923. It may appear that Lukács from the 1920s was focusing “merely” on

aesthetics, but aesthetics is deeply political and the central field political theory and action in the

context of the Soviet Union.32 As Tormey argues he “devoted some of his most productive years to

developing his account of the aesthetic as the basis for defetishisation and thus the key to unlocking

radical social change” alongside rather many Western left-wing theorists from Benjamin to

Marcuse.33

Lukács set an example of an intellectual who moved in the circles that interesting to himself

―irrespective of the potential asymmetries or physical constraints of distances between Ibsen,

Simmel, Weber, and Bloch, and Budapest, Berlin, and Heidelberg in the first phase, and Vienna,

Budapest, Berlin, and Moscow in the second phase of international activity. Lukács’s generation of

self-funded or, to be apt, family-funded academics experienced Europe as playground of relatively

free movement, until First World War and later the emergence of authoritarian regimes in Central

Europe. As a communist, Lukács faced exile from his native country. Whereas Red Vienna treated

him and other exiles well, political situation changed there, too. Although he was first summoned to

Moscow to demonstrate his allegiance, Lukács avoided Stalin’s purges that hit his colleague in the

Soviet Union by residing in Berlin. Finally, after the Second World War he returned to his home

30 Judit Marcus and Zoltan Tarr, “Introduction”, in Judit Marcus and Zoltan Tarr, eds. Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture,

and Politics (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction, 1989), 3. 31 Marcus and Tarr, Georg Lukács, 3. 32 Terry Eagleton. "Aesthetics and Politics" New Left Review 107 (1978): 21; Erjavec, Ale, ed. Aesthetic Revolutions

and Twentieth-century Avant-garde Movements. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 33 Tormey, Agnes Heller: 24–25.

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country that became under Soviet control. Moving between Budapest, Vienna, Heidelberg, and

Moscow, Lukács had created networks and reputation for his thinking. These networks became again

important when de-Stalinization era provided a possibility to rethink Socialism. Stalin died in March

1953, and in the summer there were mass protests in the DDR. In Poland and Hungary there were

emerging movements, which later culminated in 1956. While Lukács stayed a communist until the

end of his life, he did take part in the reformist government of Imre Nagy, who sought to tie Hungary

to the Western tradition of Marxism. The Frankfurt School was a crucial point of contact.

In conclusion, in the 1920s and 1930s the development of socialism intensified (until it

stagnated to authoritarianism) in Russia, and alongside the officially approved Soviet view there were

also competing ideas. The division to the Soviet and Western Marxism had been established. In the

1950s the Hungarian philosopher sought ways to challenge the hierarchized East-West divide, and to

enable them, what became the Budapest School, to rearticulate borders in the European intellectual

space. There were also others who worked from this in-between position considering this established

dichotomy between the Western and Eastern Marxism, namely the Yugoslav comrades of the Praxis

group, and indeed collaboration emerged between the Budapest School and Praxis.34

Asymmetries emerged within the Soviet-led camp, and Lukács managed to contest the

hegemony despite his loyalty to the chosen path. This heterogeneity and challenges to both local

hegemonies and those of the centers also contributed to European socialist thought, even though the

communists in power sought to regulate their emergence. The events leading to 1956 (and later 1968)

were excluded. In what follows we will explore how the post-1968 situation, and the totalizing yet

not total hegemony of Soviet-led interpretation of communism led to hopelessness and need for the

intellectuals around Lukács to evaluate their strategies.

The Budapest School as a node in Western Marxism

The ‘revolution of 1956’ led by Imre Nagy aimed to move Hungary from the Soviet control towards

a more Western path to Socialism. Lukács was the minister of culture of the short-lived government.

After losing that position, the Budapest School started to form as a group of friendship, apprehension,

and scholarship. In the 1950s and 1960s, new generations learned to think with Lukács, and the

34 Heller accounts for the Korcula summer school organised by Mihajlo Marković and the Praxis group in August 1965,

where the Budapest School was invited, as a successful case of intellectual networking. Heller names Lucien Goldman,

Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Habermas, Iring Fetscher, [Ernst] Mandel, the famous Trotskyist, Lesek Kołakowski, and Herbert

Marcuse and in the English version she Gajo Petrović, Danilo Petrivić, and Danko Grlić. ”All taking part in the

discussion: a real star parade. And not just the stars, but also masses of youth from Yugoslavia, Germany, the UK and

the US, who came to listen to the stars.” Ágnes Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő,

1999), 192. ”It was into this discourse that I was through in August 1965, and I did not leave it for more than a decade.”

Ágnes Heller, The History of My Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

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Budapest School was established and become a tight-net of friends, expanding to the next generation

“The Lukács Kindergarten.” Their situation got worse, and on 15 February 1971, Lukács published

in The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) a piece “The Budapest School of Marxism,” which

established the intellectual position as the next generations of Lukács’s thought and attracted attention

from the West to Lukács, some intrigued, some suspicious, as Ivan Szelényi wrote in 1977.35 The

collaboration and friendship started organically, but the strategy of Fehér expanded it into a School

that provided the underlying cement. Heller argues how the letter to the TLS has been the idea of

Ferenc Fehér and Iván Szelényi.36 The master was passing on his inheritance to the next generation:

this was not simply his thought ―they had learned from and with him but not really following it

closely― but his connections and reputation, position in the international canons of socialist thought.

“When Lukács wrote that article to the Times, he referred to the work of us four. With that as a king

conferred us to knighthood and gave us a sword […]”, Heller explained.37 Heller has also insisted on

defining who “us” the Budapest school were (herself, her husband Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus,

and Mihály Vajda), and how, for example, the economist János Kis and György Bence were Márkus’s

students.38

The affiliation to Lukács provided already earlier access to the networks and outlets in the

West, not as individual authors but carriers of a tradition and representatives of this alternative

theoretical approach that was emerging in Hungary. “Feri [Fehér] thought that one person alone is

not worth much even theoretically ―schools have value. Besides the personality of Lukács, [Fehér’s]

resoluteness was the cement, which kept together the school. For him it was important that we are

together, think together, discuss everything together: represent one truth, which we can posit against

the party and the official lies.” 39 Heller seemed more skeptical, as they started from the same

background but developed in their own ways. She accounts how it was Fehér who took a managerial

role, in urging for contacts abroad. Learning and publishing in different languages became a strategy

35 Iván Szelényi “Notes on the “Budapest school”, Critique, 8, no. 1, 1977. 36 In the 1990s Heller also gave interviews on herself (here a collection from the EMIS database has been used) in this

period that have been used as background material. Heller published The History of My Thought, reflecting on her oeuvre

and the contexts of writing, a memoir of her life edited by János Köbányai (translated also to German), and autobiography

on her time in New York (in Hungarian), where the excerpts in these final two sections mainly are drawn. Considering

the timing of the piece we quote here, the recent death of Fehér could be giving a rosy picture of him. On the other hand,

Heller also speaks about the love of her youth fondly. Autobiographies can be questionable sources for history, but here

we are focused on the argument about node-building and asymmetries in European intellectual space. Heller and

Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom; Ágnes Heller, New York Nosztalgia, (Budapest: Jelenkor, 2008); Heller, The History of My

Philosophy. 37 Heller and Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom. 38 Heller argues that the Budapest School was born on the basis of of the circle of friends, the Márkus couple, the Vajda

couple and Heller and Fehér. Heller and Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom, 160. Heller excluded Mária Lugassy, whose

affiliation with the School has been debated. 39 Heller and Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom, 167.

11

for the Lukács School. Heller knew German because of her father was a German speaker.40 In fact,

one of the only jobs she had was to translate Rosa Luxembourg to Hungarian. What they could not

get published in Hungary, they sent to the networks of the European Left abroad, and in this way they

became recognized as theorists of the New Left. Whereas intellectual space in Hungary was regulated

on both the native writers and philosophers, and the influx of translation, the connections, translations,

and language skills enabled the Lukács school to published abroad, particularly in Italy and Western

Germany. When the possibilities to work or publish in Hungary became difficult, Lukács became

Heller and her colleagues’ bridge to Europe, in Italy, Paris, Berlin, and rest of Germany.

The ‘Iron Curtain’ was penetrable, but it required effort. There were also contacts in Poland,

for instance, Leszek Kołakowski, and in Yugoslavia the Praxis Group, the latter being almost on the

other side of the curtain. Heller explains how as Lukács was too old to travel, she took on board

invitations and met with his old friends and colleagues, and even corresponded with them and

published her work abroad. The access to Germany, for example, was possible through the DDR. She

was not alone, and sometime Heller and her colleagues from the Lukács School even found

themselves visiting different sides of the divided city of Berlin. Travelling to Berlin to teach at the

Freie Universitet in the West, was a possibility to Heller to engage with scholars of the New Left. In

and by 1968 the colleagues managed to meet the Frankfurt School scholars, including Adorno. Heller

explains that she broke through in Italy, in particular, where her work was used in a similar fashion

as a manifesto of the left as Marcuse’s in Germany.41

After Lukács died in 1973, things started getting even more difficult for them – losing the

teaching positions and unable to publish.42 But the future life of the School was only about to start.

Making one’s mark in the intellectual space had been important for Lukács whose History of Class-

consciousness had become a key intervention in Western Marxist tradition. In 1974 two in the next

generation, the Lukács kindergarten ―Iván Szelényi and György/George Konrád― working

remotely from Budapest, wrote a seminal thesis and a criticism of the Soviet style regime in Hungary

The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.43 They explained how generally in the Marxist theory

intellectuals were a stratum but for the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci activity. All traditional

analyses created the impression that the intellectuals, the social bearers of culture, left on their works

no trace of their own historically determined existence or of their own interests. The notion of the

40 Although, Heller inisists, “he loved the Hungarian language that he learned from four”. While of her maternal

grandmother she says, “she not only did not speak German but only knew the Hungarian world.” Heller and Kőbányai,

Bicikliző majom, 7, 11. 41 Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom, 190–209. 42 It became particularly difficult after the official commemorations had been done, when Lukács was commemorated in

the street names of Budapest and a book by István Hermann was published on him in 1974. 43 George Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979).

12

interests of the intellectual class would have been as impossible one, as classes in the “classless

society” of communism did not officially exist.44

The manuscript circulated among colleagues, but after the Secret Police found out that it

existed ―although it was already exported― the scholars were given a choice: to emigrate with their

families or remain and practically choose an internal exile. Szelényi, the trained sociologist, chose to

leave. Konrád, the literary author, departed shortly to Germany and then stayed and disseminated his

thought and writings in samizdats and abroad. Szelényi became one of the key Hungarian intellectuals

abroad, first emigrating to the UK University of Kent in 1975, and Australia where a hub of Hungarian

social theory was formed, and later to the USA. Konrad became an internationally renowned and

networked author in the region influential for future developments in Hungary and Central European

politics.

It appears that Iván Szelényi became one of the key actors in the future establishment of the

Budapest School. Ágnes Heller acknowledges that Szelényi was behind both of her important

positions.45 The nine years younger Szelényi was of the next generation, what was called the

Kindergarten of Lukács. The existence of the Budapest School was also important node in for

Szelényi’s career. But this was not a one-way street. The establishment and maintenance of the School

as an alternative center in the theorist network required active work. In an academic branding

endeavor like this, packaging and marketing was crucial. It turned these dissident authors into

scholarly figures who were interesting to hear more about and meet. It appears that this conscious

effort of establishing a node was working out. The attraction worked in a similar way as with the

Yugoslav colleagues of the Praxis group and feminists (see chapter XX in this volume). In the

beginning of the Praxis International members of the Budapest School wrote to almost each issue.

Then Thesis Eleven became one of their venues.46

Emigrations and returns

After the death of Lukács and the emigration the School was also starting to disintegrate, with each

moving to their own directions also in their personal lives, Mihaly Vajda found a position in

Bremen.47 This section shows how the Budapest School transformed into something else a fortess.

Not tied to the fixed and nominal geographical location, it would move, and challenge the physical

44 For further discussion see for example Katherine Verdery, et al., “Rereading the Intellectuals on the Road to Class

Power”, Theory and Society, 34, no. 1 (2005), 1–36. 45 Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom. 46 John Rundell, “Agnes Heller: Critical theory, value reflexivity and horizons of modernity”, Thesis Eleven, online first

2016, 10.1177/0725513616654789. 47 They visited each other but the connection disappeared. Heller writes openly about the disappointment in growing

appart but also about the reconciliation after years in exile. Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom.

13

or political limits on European intellectual space and establish a new contact to Europe through

praxis: access from outside Europe rather than from the other side of the division, extension of the

“European” intellectual field to outside the physical limits of Europe and renewing contacts and

networks with West European scholars. We also explore some of practicalities that were related to

departures and concerns of the future asymmetries through Heller’s autobiographical work which

goes beyond the traditional discussion on canonized great men.

Heller recalls that immigration was on the agenda for the first time in 1974, when Iván

Szelényi was arrested. When Szelényi moved to the Flindiers University of South Australia to

establish sociology department in 1976, Heller accounts how he was recommending the remaining

Budapest School colleagues to join him. They were hesitant, but people around them started leaving.

Mihály Vajda already moved to Germany. Heller accounts how György Márkus was particularly

reluctant to move, as probably the school could no longer live in the same city. Still he got a position

in Sydney. Finally, three thirds of this original four Budapest school members (Fehér, Heller and

Márkus) immigrated to Australia, which became a hub of Hungarian social theory in the 1970s and

1980s.

Heller started to work at La Trobe University in Melbourne in 1978, moving to the city at the

end of the year 1977. She explains that something that helped in immigration was that in in the end

of 1970s, in state-socialist Hungary, she could make a telephone call relatively easily abroad ––even

to Australia, to arrange everything for her departure. Although she does not stress it at all, we can

read through the lines a material reality that impacts intellectuals with families even today: she had

an elderly mother, a grown-up daughter Zsuzsa Hermann (b. 1952) and a young son Gyúri (b. 1964).

Multigenerational families were important and practical for her. Accounting for her family life during

the active years of study with Lukács, Heller mentions the importance of her mother caring for her

child when she was out doing what philosophers do, sitting around, talking and drinking. When Heller

and Ferencs Fehér and their son emigrated to Australia, they had a nanny, initially. It was a language

and culture learning experience to them all. The Márkus family also moved to Australia, and remained

in Sydney. They did not manage to live, work, and think in the same city, as Márkus had worried

about, but to visit each other regularly. They even wrote together.48

There was another reason for moving to Australia: Europe. Paradoxically, Heller explains

how, during her years in Australia, she enjoyed the relative proximity to Vienna: getting permission

to visit from communist Hungary could take months, from Australia she could get on the next plane.

Flying out of the cage had more than a metaphorical meaning. She explains how she got to know

48 Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom.

14

worlds so far unknown to her: “I, who almost until my fiftieth birthday could hardly leave my tiny

country, suddenly came to live as a globetrotter. Vienna was ‘closer’ to Melbourne than Budapest,

for it could be reached in twenty-five hours without waiting for an exit visa.”49 But while Heller did

get a job, it was hard for Fehér to gain a permanent position. Heller writes about TV dinners with her

son, when Fehér was teaching elsewhere in Australia. There was no Budapest School left, but there

was international engagement. They were writing analysis: Heller, always alone, to Italian, American,

German, Swedish and Spanish newspapers.50 Szelényi moved to the USA, becoming a professor in

the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. The Márkus family stayed in Sydney but in 1986

Heller and Fehér moved to the USA, first to Wisconsin-Madison. Heller was reluctant to leave hastily:

she wanted to wait for a Green Card as that would enable her to access Europe. She became the

Hannah Arendt professor of philosophy at the New School New York. Fehér also found a position at

the New School. Mihály Vajda, who remained in Europe, wrote in his obituaries of Ferenc Fehér that

he was a “man in transcendental homelessness.”51 This man of grand narratives, the historicist52 had

been the primus motor of the internationalization and integration of the Budapest School, had

allegedly been at his best in Hungarian, having even as an émigré done his thinking in Hungarian.53

Heller in her New York nosztalgia argues how she was at home abroad, enjoying both

Australia and New York.54 When Heller moved from the most prestigious left-wing institute that

sought to restore critical thinking from the shatters of the Second World War in Europe back to

Hungary, she moved from the center and universal theoretical debates to seemingly peripheral

national debates. An individualist-universalist thinker at least in her mature intellectual life, and a

Western Marxist in from the “Eastern Bloc”, she chose to focus on herself as a Jewish and Hungarian

intellectual. Having chosen the name of her chair, Hannah Arendt, was part of this modification of

her brand. This can be compared to Richard Rorty’s self-projection as an American intellectual and

“leftist American patriot”. 55 Her work conveys a sentiment of urgent worry that these subject

positions were not easily available, and here Heller sought to highlight them as options. Budapest had

been a city with Jewish neighborhoods in the same vain as the New York of her experience was. What

she presents of her writings is a subject position for a Hungarian, Budapest Jew. It is like her life in

Manhattan and work at the New School New York would have prepared her for this quest. Instead of

49 Heller, The History of My Philosophy, 55–56. 50 Heller, The History of My Philosophy, 55. 51 Mihály Vajda, “Man in Transcendental Homelessness: In Memory of Ferenc Fehér”, Thesis Eleven, Jan 1, 1995, 42

no. 1, 32–40. 52 Mihály Vajda, “Darkness at Noon: In Memory of Ferenc Fehér” Constellations, 3 no. 3 (1997), 286. 53 Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom. 54 Heller and János Kőbányai, New York. 55 Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The making of an American philosopher. (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Kindle

edition.

15

contending with the image of being a “rootless intellectual”, which still features in the nationalist and

sometimes anti-Semitic stereotypes, Heller declares and endorses her own roots.

Repatriation and Europe

The intellectuals have had an important role in East Central Europe and in Hungary: traditionally they

provided advice to their fellow countrymen at home.56 Heller did not really participate in the dissident

movement in the 1980s in Hungary. But she and her husband Ferenc Fehér were giving interviews to

Radio Free Europe and to the press. They had divided their interests with Fehér: he would occupy

himself with political science and daily matters, she would focus on more abstract yet quite present

issues. They planned to return and started building a summer cottage. Fehér passed away in Budapest

in 1994, after the elections that took the Liberal SzDSz and reform Socialists into power. While Fehér

“died of happiness”, as Heller accounts, this event was also decisive for the Hungarian politics and

the emergence of political polarization.57 After this period Heller started to fill Fehér’s role in public

discussion.

Heller had increasingly, especially from her Everyday Life (1984), a “desire to engage with

an intellectual debate of broader significance and scope than associated with the efforts of reform

communists [in Hungary and Eastern Europe],” which made some see her as ‘rootless’ intellectual.58

In her autobiography, she termed the period of 1980–1995 as “The Years of Building and

Intervention”, where the intervention was also global and philosophical, and in English ––as she

started writing everything but her diary in English.59 Although the topics she deals with mark a

distance to the particular experience to Hungary, setting her apart from her native colleagues, the

alleged ‘rootlessness’ is in contradiction with the general ethos of Heller in her autobiographical

writings. Or perhaps she responded to the allegations of rootlessness that fit a stereotype of a Jewish

intellectual.

One of the important roots Heller claimed was “Europe”. Alongside Jürgen Habermas, her

German colleague, Heller has been writing about European intellectual space and the crucial public

role of intellectuals. For Heller, this impulse for “Europe” was from the start one of asymmetry: the

need to access shared European cultural heritage had been delayed and distanced by the Soviet

focused regime and cultural realm. In her autobiographical work Heller writes of her early trips to

European cultural cities Italy and France, when she and her first husband explored the classic arts and

56 Bozoki, Intellectuals. 57 E.g. Emilia Palonen, ‘Political Polarisation and Populism in Contemporary Hungary’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62, no. 2

(2009): 318–334. 58 Márkus quoted in Tormey, Agnes Heller…, 12. 59 Agnes Heller, The History of My Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 53.

16

lived on a shoestring. There is this yearning for the classical European culture, for renaissance art that

affected Heller’s thinking. She enjoyed their trips, and wanted to come back to the memory of these

trips writing the book on Renaissance, to keep cultural Europe present for her in writing, and to

maintain the memory of her father writing about Shakespeare.60

“Since I began to write, I always felt a strong urge to include one or another Shakespeare […]

into my texts, either as an illustration to a theory or my way of thinking, or as quotation in support of

an idea”, Heller writes and although Shakespeare was the very “singular” for hers61, it was also a

global theme. The first work she translated into English was her Renaissance Man, originally

published in Hungarian in 1967 and then in English in 1978 after emigrating to Australia.62 The

response by her critics yielded the book interesting even though it seemed to be based on limited

material, at times factually wrong and internally contradictious.63 It goes in showing the strength of

Heller in engaging with difficult issues and her braveness to cross borders even through imagination.

Was she even aware of the traditions of reading Shakespeare in England? The criticism on Heller’s

early work also shows the existence of a fundamental frontier in Europe: asymmetry of the limited

experience of other societies than her own and limited access to source materials. It contributed to

her style and the urge to speak in universalistic terms, explore beyond boundaries.

Boundaries are re-emerging in the 2010s between Hungary and Europe. Contrasted to her

colleague Habermas of the Frankfurt School, whom she has hosted in Budapest, Heller emerges from

the position oscillating between the center-periphery or even occupying both positions at once.

Somehow Hungary, while being centrally located in the continent, is peripheral as a new member

state of the European Union in contrast to Germany as one of the founders, and yet, a crucial

trendsetter as populism is spreading and intensifying across the continent. The worry of Heller

towards her native country’s turning away from Europe is recorded in several writings and interviews.

It is reminiscent of the earlier periods of her life, the post-1956 era and the 1980s: the critical

Hungarian voices were often heard through the German or other foreign press. Once again, Europe

became the outlet for ideas, and rearticulated as the site of critique. When the right-wing government

of Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, she became a political point of contestation for populist

politics. So the debate between the Fidez government and Heller is also a fight about “Europe” and

Hungary’s position in this. After all Orbán’s since 2010 had defined both Heller and Europe as the

others in his nationalist-populist discourse.

60 Heller and János Kőbányai, Bicikliző majom; Heller, The History of My Philosophy. 61 Heller, History of my Philosophy, 119, see also 119–122 on Shakespeare. 62 Heller, History of my Philosophy. 63 E.g. Levitas 1980.

17

Heller, Fehér, and Mihály Vajda who also returned to Hungary, Szeged, from Germany, had

resumed contact before Fehér’s death, and discussed, as Vajda argues, the “heritage of our master”,

Lukács, that they had become “completely estranged from” but still “linked up, by a secret thread, to

that heritage.”64 Later Heller and Vajda got a state-funded project in Hungary. After the change of

government in 2010, the right-wing press Magyar Nemzet was accusing them to be corrupted:

allegations were later found unfounded. As a critic of the government, Heller faced other accusations.

She was vocal abroad, too, in defending the previous Prime Ministers and, for instance, questioning

whether the Socialist-Liberal government employed rubber bullets towards demonstrators in the 2006

riots that followed after PM Gyurcsányi admitted to having lied.65 This turned the right-wing press

to argue that she was a liar. Some of the attacks were also anti-Semitic. At the Budapest University

of Humanities and Law (ELTE) some students were posting stickers with the text: “Jews, we own

this university, not you!” The pictures of Heller’s office door had a global circulation and shocked

response.

Heller remained active transnational scholar in Hungary and taking part in local political

debates and acts as one of the staunchest critics of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government, particularly

towards its anti-European tone. Her vision for Europe includes a cultural elite that is beyond the

division of labor and necessary for democracy: “it is about democratic mentality, yet also about the

breath of interest, about the readiness for reflection, for disinterested conversation, for public

intervention”. 66 The idea that for a democratic Europe to exist, there is a need for engaged

intellectuals, seems to be at the heart of Heller’s intellectual praxis. Her experience could equally be

revisited to reflect on contemporary limitations of access to knowledge from the margins to the center,

and to the relativity of that center ―be it in Australia or New York― to Europe as her intellectual

space. Her life is mirrors the lengthy twentieth century from her birth in 1929, through the Second

World War, migration waves to the present, including the new waves of anti-Semitism, that also

feature in Europe.

The expanding semi-peripheries of Europe

The tradition of great philosophers, national canons, classics of philosophy and political

thought, as an academic genre generate an impression of thinker and thought as inseparable, and

direct us to reflect upon intellectuals as alone-standing individuals. As this volume has shown,

64 Vajda, ”Darkness at Noon”, 283. 65 For the context of naked emperors of democracy see Emilia Palonen “Transition to Crisis in Hungary: Whistle-Blowing

on the Naked Emperor”, Politics and Policy 40, no. 5 (2012), 930–957. 66 Agnes Heller, “The stories of Europe”, in Sari Aalto and Saara Vihko eds., The Idea of Europe: Continuity and Change

(Helsinki: European Cultural Foundation Network Finland, 2007).

18

thought and thinkers are transnational, and the particularly interesting aspects about them perhaps are

not the symmetries but what escapes or contests hegemonic perceptions. Networks and processes of

transnational activity, friendships are crucial also for thought and people as many biographers and

thinkers have noticed. In our current times ―considering the situation in Hungary, Europe, and the

world―, developing analysis and responses that challenge phenomenon such as anti-intellectualism

entangled with right-wing populism seems relevant. This account of the Budapest school extending

itself to an ethos beyond a set of individual authors to schools of thought and positions on truth.

Here we have looked at, mainly, two self-positioning67 scholars. Lukács wanted to explain in a

republication of his seminal work that he had read Marx through a network ―shaped by his

encounters, influences, and interests. This network was his “playground” in Europe, and the praxis

of engaging with the networks further contributed to development of communism and the European

intellectual space. He endorsed the hegemony establishing in the “Eastern Europe” while trying to

theorise a new way out that resonated in the “West”. Heller accounted for her life as a Hungarian

Jewish intellectual, claiming her roots both in Hungary, Australia, and the US (or at least Manhattan

in New York). Her craving for Europe and belonging to the European intellectual space was felt from

her first childhood readings to touristic visits to the West in postwar Hungary to her defence of Europe

at the Hungarian critical government in the 2010s. But as dichotomies go, this outside also belongs

to some degree ―particularly through institutions like the New School― to European intellectual

space, too. Szelényi, Heller, Fehér, and Márkus turned Australia into this semi-periphery of

Hungarian social theory. This praxis that ossilates between the local, national and beyond

(re)constitutes Europe as an intellectual space.

The Budapest School constituted an important node that belonged neither directly to the West

or the East–– in the postwar European intellectual space. Challenging the hegemonic understanding

of the borders of the European intellectual space as limited to the physical borders of Europe, it offers

another perspective that takes a global perspective on “Europe”. While there is no such a thing as

singular “European thought,” there are transnational processes that shape thinking in Europe. The

semi-peripheries in Europe discussed in this volume have a special role and, as this chapter shows,

the former colonies such as Australia and the US also constitute Europe’s semi-periphery, where

important articulations of “Europe” take place.

Often discussion on the Budapest School is tied to what these authors actually argued. We

may ask, what was the coherent vision of “truth” as Fehér suggested they have been working on, or

who were the people belonging to it or not? But perhaps Budapest School had more to do with the

67 See e.g. Gross, Richard Rorty: The making of an American philosopher. (University of Chicago Press, 2009),

Introduction, 4, loc. 500–1.

19

ethos of a counterhegemonic grand narrative as the significant asymmetry. It emerged despite the

divided opinions on grand narratives among the members of the school. Perhaps it also contributed

to Vajda’s need to make his own path in Germany.68 This counterhegemonic grand narrative enabled

them to transcend the particular struggle in Hungary, and explore the connection to those in other

places. Fehér thought that only as a group they would be powerful, an Szelényi seemed to understand

and work on the global interest for this node of Marxist thought.

The political theorist Simon Tormey argues, that Heller democratizes the framework of

Lukács in The History and Class Consciousness, but retains the notion of few individuals having a

chance to elevate themselves beyond the everyday, and proposes transformation of everyday in a

larger way to give chances for such processes.69 This idea is present in discussing, albeit briefly, first,

everyday aspects of immigration and conditions where (wo)men are able to emigrate, and, second,

the way in which in Heller’s days, as after the Second World War or even in the nineteenth century,

dissidents from countries like Hungary were interesting abroad. The intellectual rescue of Hungarians

to Western universities was in some way semi-ethicized and disciplinary curiosity. It invites one to

reflect what the interests are in the academic markets today. Are we interested in the global or most

often Western intellectual centers and their canonized intellectuals’ reflections which are based on

the relatively set or privileged conditions? Or would we like to listen to and engage intellectually with

the dissident-intellectuals from oppressive regimes or peripheries?

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