Adam Fabry, The Political Economy of Hungary. From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism

Abstract

manual workers limits the opportunities for generalization. On the one hand, the consolidation of capitalism has crystallized social classes, as is evident in lifestyle choices, parents’ aspirations for their children’s educational and occupational prospects, and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. On the other hand, however, ‘legacies of the old regime in the form of egalitarian values’ (151), far from having been abolished, have in fact been revived through cross-class sociability. Cepić attributes this egalitarianism, ‘both in a sense of failing to build one’s feeling of self-worth on a class basis, and in the sense of creating cross-class friendships’(152), to the resilience of old sociocultural structures. The author could have considered his findings as a symptom of the present system’s incapacity to meet the expectations of many people and thus a warranted response to rising social inequalities. This, however, is something he failed to do.