Guest Editor’s Foreword

Jaap Dronkers, who has significantly reviewed new sociological inquiry on the continuing social relevance of the European nobility, associated the vitality of this community with its unique capabilities of accumulating social and cultural capital . To be sure, in some studies, Dronkers with his collaborators also mentioned the importance of material capital which has contributed to the prevalence of the comprehensive network of noble origin families in Western Europe (Korom–Dronkers 2009) . Dronkers’ attention was focused mainly on the Dutch civil nobility, which, unlike military or landed nobility, was better adapted to the dominant bourgeoise-oriented modernity, what additionally explains the continuing social relevance of this group . Importantly, Dronkers (2003: 83) admitted that the prevalence of nobility in contemporary Europe has its limits, namely: “the importance of noble origins declines only if social relationships change so rapidly (e .g . due to a revolution, defeat in a war, or a serious economic recession) that the old social and cultural family capital is no longer usable or ceases to apply under the new circumstances” . Albeit Dronkers did not make mention of Eastern Europe, it could be inferred from his statement that nobility in countries re-arranged by communist revolutions during the crucial period of 1944–1956 ceased to exist, by the very definition, as a comprehensive social class . The slowly emerging studies on contemporary Eastern European nobility, particularly on the Hungarian and Polish noble milieu (e .g . Jakubowska 2005, Sztáray-Kézdy 2009, Smoczynski–Zarycki 2012), partially confirmed Dronkers’ muses. We cannot identify a noble social stratum in Eastern Europe which would comply with the Weberian or Marxian class criteria . Probably, the confiscation of land properties, a structural constrain imposed on the capital accumulation within the relics of noble networks, and eventually the gradual process of the relocation of noble origin individuals into other class positions, most notably into the intelligentsia stratum, were the most important reasons of this class extinction . Having noted this obvious fact, we should also note that the above-mentioned novel studies have shaken the assumption about the historical necessity of the disappearance of noble networks in Eastern Europe ActA Univ. SApientiAe, SociAl AnAlySiS, 9 (2019) 5–7