Voice, Choice, and Withdrawal: The Political Roles of Intellectuals

Intellectuals might have different roles in society but one of their most prominent activities is to participate in public discussion and thus to influence public opinion and policy formation. Sometimes, especially at times of radical political change, intellectuals play extraordinarily influential roles in politics while in „normal times” they focus on their own profession. My aim here is to reconstruct the transformation of intellectuals’ roles in a decade when they played unusually influential role: It occurred in Hungary between 1982 and 1993. During this period of time three different roles are identified: 1. Delegitimizing the autocratic regime by the power of „culture of critical discourse” over the 1980s; 2. Participating at the historic Roundtable Talks and entering party politics – and, by doing so, playing the roles of founder, legislator, and professional (1989-90); Finally, 3. the return from party politics to the movement scene in civil society by formulating general democratic standards vis-a-vis democratic party politics (1991-93). This third period represents the process of slow withdrawal from the front-line of politics by displaying new roles as movement-intellectuals, universalist critics and professionals. Ideas of Benda, Gramsci, Mannheim, Gouldner, Bauman and Eyerman & Jamison will be contrasted and analyzed in the given historical context. The research is based on qualitative methods i.e. analysis of the samizdat literature, interviews, manifestos and other written forms of political discourse.

András Bozóki is faculty fellow at IAS, Professor of Political Science at the Central European University. He received his PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1992. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, East-Central European politics, the transformation of communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism.