Whither Hungarian Mittelstand?
Whither Hungarian Mittelstand?

Summary/Abstract: This essay discusses the middle class in Hungary, not from a sociologist’s angle, but its present situation and social weight. The title invokes a particular social construct, one that played a key role in the concept as well as in the successful practice of Germany’s Sozialmarktwirtschaft back in the 1950s.? Social market economy differs from other versions of market based socioeconomic system in many aspects; a healthy and socially active propertied middle class equipped with entrepreneurial skills and civic values is one of the features that distinguishes it from several other varieties of successful market economy (“capitalism”). Yes, it is important to underscore, given the widespread misunderstanding about it, that the social market economy was not only a German-accented variety of capitalism (cf. Walter Röpke, Walter Eucken, Konrad Adenauer) but also one that proved to be a very successful version. The adjective “social” does not imply less competition or restrained performance in the original model, quite the contrary: the Ordoliberal school that provided the theoretical underpinning for what became known as the German economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s called for more competition and in particular more competitors, that is, for a large number of economically active agents. This version of market order is thus called social because it aims at the widest possible inclusion of members of society into economic value generation.

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