Intellectuals and their Discontent in Hungary: Class Power or Marginality?

Abstract

The 1970s marked the rise of the “second generation” of post-war dissident/critical intellectuals in Eastern Europe. The first generation, with which members of the new generation did not, as a rule, claim ideological kinship, had been the great and near-great rebels, nay-sayers and the revisionist Marxist philosophical loners of the 1930s and the 1940s who could not find accommodation with the harsh realities and the politics of Stalinist expediency of the 1950s. Djilas, Kolakowski, Lukács and Brecht addressed broad moral and ethical issues as these surfaced in the early “difficult” years of socio-political transformation in Eastern Europe.1 Ideological conscientious objectors are never welcome in a one-party state, and critical writings about the moral turpitude of the New Class, the ethical indefensibility of historical determinism, the idiocy of the cult of personality clothed in the doctrine of socialist realism and the dictatorship of the anti-intellectual apparatchiki were suppressed and their authors forced into premature retirement from public life.