Review of “The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary”

Abstract

In The Retreat of Liberal Democracy, Gábor Scheiring sets out to explain the retrenchment of democratic institutions in his home country of Hungary following the election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2010. This is a deeply personal story for Scheiring, who watched his parents struggle with the hardship and disillusionment that accompanied the transition from socialism to capitalism. While Scheiring served in the Hungarian parliament from 2010 to 2014 as part of the country’s burgeoning green movement, his father—a blue-collar worker—turned to the right. This book is, in many respects, an attempt to make sense of this experience—to make sense of how members of the working class came to see Orbánism as a palliative for the experience of class dislocation in the post-socialist era. But workers were not the only ones hurt by the transition to capitalism. As Scheiring describes, the push for market liberalization was part and...