Transition to Utopia: A Reinterpretation of Economics, Ideas, and Politics in Hungary, 1984 to 1990
Transition to Utopia: A Reinterpretation of Economics, Ideas, and Politics in Hungary, 1984 to 1990

Summary/Abstract: Although political economists tend to emphasize how economic interests affect politics or how political structure influences the economy, the purpose here is to investigate a less common but no less important possibility: that the economy, by failing, might spur intellectual rejection and a search for a radically new and radically totalistic alternative to the present system. Economic crisis, in short, might be the handmaiden of intellectual utopianism. My empirical study of Hungarian economists and political change from 1984 to 1990 makes clear that capitalism has a heavily utopian character for Hungary and that this "utopian capitalism" grew out of the crisis of Kadarist neotraditionalism. Economically, the model of state socialism reached bankruptcy by the mid-1980s. [...]

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