Pluralism after the Regime Change and its Roots in the History of Political Thought.

This research was conceived during our teaching the history of Hungarian political thought at the Corvinus University, Budapest. Monographies and other textbooks on this topic usually ignore or have not yet canvassed the post-regime change period. There is an obvious need to redress this shortage. However, we also offer some methodological innovations and a new approach. The conception is to survey and analyse the political ideological and theoretical debates of the past three decades partly by exploring the intellectual and historical roots, and thus to advance an ex post reconstruction of the history of Hungarian political thought. We do not want to simply line up authors, nor do we want to follow a strictly conceptual analysis or a discourse analysis. Rather, we wish to rely and build on the historical self-reflective capacities of the respective ideologies. We also wish to employ M. Freeden's morphological method as well as A. MacIntyre's concept of social practice. 

Principal investigator: Zoltán Balázs

Participating researchers: Csaba Molnár