In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the provisions for the imperial and royal army consumed a large part of the Habsburg Monarchy’s treasury expenditure, making army supply one of the most important public procurement procedures of the time. In this article, this complex system, which, in the words of O. Williamson, operated on the borderline between market and hierarchy, is presented through the memoirs of Ignác Vörös de Farad (1757–1825). The author of this ego-document was a commissioner during the war between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire in 1788–1791, and as such was involved in the management of the supply system. Through textual analysis, the system and its stakeholders in a period of military conflict are made visible and interpretable, using methods of new institutional economics and new economic criticism. The paper is based on the forthcoming publication by the authors, entitled A katona, a kereskedő, a tisztviselő és az egér: Hadseregellátás és mikrotörténet: a regénytől az aktáig (The Soldier, the Merchant, the Clerk, and the Mouse: Military Supply and Microhistory from Novels to Archives.).

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Leó Lánczy was the CEO of the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest, the largest Hungarian bank at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was an age when social Darwinism, coupled with an organic concept of society, provided a suitable terrain for connecting liberalism and nationalism. The banker viewed the matter of the nation as the issue of the central bank and financial markets. In the case of the former, Lánczy could not subscribe to the views of political nationalists. He dispensed his counsel much like a doctor advises prevention before cure, e.g. “should we decide on an independent central bank, we must be aware of such and such possible problem”. He did, however, wholeheartedly embrace the idea of south-eastern expansion. In this question he shared the ideology of Béni Kállay, a politician who presented his unique mixture of liberalism and imperialism as the preservation of the middle classes – or rather racial preservation, as it would be seen today.

Since the democratic political transition in 1989–1990, there have been several debates in Hungary concerning the autonomy, self-representation, and monopolistic position of certain professions. In other cases controversies were sparked about the contents and purpose of professional education. Much less work has been done about the real meaning of professional self-representation, associations and vocational higher education. Whereas in North-Atlantic societies the process of professionalization generated ongoing disputes, and remained a steady issue in social scientific discourse for several decades after World War II, the same debates were largely absent in Hungary before 1990. This was partly due to the socialist regime which objected to autonomies of any kind, including the autonomy of occupational groups; scholarly discourse about the professions was thus discouraged, and attention was mostly focused on intellectuals. The relatively low interest in professionalization was also a consequence of the fact that the professions had never been as centrally important in Hungarian social stratification as they were in Northwestern European and American societies. Following a brief history of professionalization theories and an overview of recent international and Hungarian sociological and historical literature, the classical essay of Harold L. Wilensky is introduced to the Hungarian public.

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Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr.’s Strategy and Structure was well received in Hungary in the early 1970’s, however, not for the merits the author would have attributed to his work. It is high time the main thoughts of the famous business historian were recapitulated for the Hungarian audience. After shortly tracing Chandler’s way from his biographical study on H. V. Poor to his probably most famous book published in the early sixties, the specialities of the North American economic development are summarized. This rough overview provides the background for explaining the main theses of the Visible Hand. A far-reaching argument of Chandler is that of the profound, large scale changes in input and output prices and the implied changes of processing technologies. Last but not least, the deeper processes that enabled the development in business administration outlined by Chandler have their impact on the ecological history and future of mankind, too. The paper is an implicit argument for the need of revitalization of the old historiographical genre, the so called natural history.

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