Having developed a conceptual framework for historical sociology during the 1930s and 1940s, István Hajnal played a pioneering role in the writing of social history in Hungary. However, a larger portion of his historical oeuvre fell into the category of traditional political and diplomatic history, which has been somewhat neglected by Hungarian historiography. Starting his career as a historian of literacy, Hajnal built the conceptual framework of his historical sociology on his original field, proposing its applicability on a European, even global, scale in a longue durée perspective. He elaborated it in detail to describe the development of early modern Europe, primarily focusing on the evolution of literacy, as well as incorporating urban and technology history into his broader investigations. With this, Hajnal created a counter-canon to which relatively few historians subscribed, yet it had a significant impact on sociological thinking. The question remains, however, how his historical model corresponded with the empirical knowledge of historiography at the time. Notably, Hajnal never addressed this issue himself. It was not until long after the author’s death, towards the end of the twentieth century, that István Hajnal’s thoughts on social history garnered deserved attention and attracted followers.

Nincs absztrakt.

A nation, as Ernest Renan acknowledges, cannot exist without forgetting. Forgetting and selective memory as primary factors in the creation of community do not occur spontaneously: they are the result of a nation’s memory politics implemented by force. The instrumentalisation of history is the alliance of power and forgetting. The history of the twentieth century, especially the European memory of the Second World War, is replete with examples for this. Firstly, the case of France is especially illuminating. After the war, the history of the French collaboration and the existence of the Vichy-regime were shrouded in silence and oblivion for a decade and a half. Instead, the French resistance was selected to be remembered with a special emphasis on the French as victims. It was not until the 1980s that the French began to come to terms with the past, but even this development failed to bring an honest acknowledgement of collaboration. The memory of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the Kádár Era is an example for replacing the image of a violent past with screen memory (Deckerinnerung). The Kádár propaganda brought the atrocities perpetrated by “counter-revolutionaries” to the forefront, but remained decidedly silent about the significantly more grievous violence carried out by the Hungarian Secret Service and the Soviet troops. Finally, the wilful forgetting of the entire Jewish past in line with the Nazi racial ideology went hand in hand with replacing the historical significance of a Biblical people with the concept of the Germans’ historical vocation. One of the means to achieve this was the physical destruction of the Torah and synagogues, as well as the creation of the concept of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

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The notion, labelled as dual structure came to define many of current social history and sociological approach of Hungarian society in the 20th century. The idea was first formulated by Ferenc Erdei in the 1940s, and became known in the 1970s only. The starting point for Erdei was, as for anybody else also being concerned with these problems, that Hungary's society was badly integrated in its internal make-up. Erdei, however, went well beyond this by arguing that Hungarian society had split into two and the two structures were in total opposition to each other. One of the structures was called by him "historical-national", the other a "modern bourgeois" society. Each of the two coexisting structures constituted a whole in itself, with elite, a middle class, and a lower class. The author in present study makes an attempt to prove that Erdei's contrivance devoids of any firmly rooted empirical evidence, and derives only from István Hajnal's historical sociology. Hajnal, an important Hungarian historian in the interwar period held the view that two fundamental social forces were responsible at every epoch for the dynamics of historical development: the habitual (customary) and the racional (reasonable) principle. Erdei in describing the stratification found in his own age merely applies this theory to the contemporary Hungarian society. Seeing the obvious weaknesses of Hajnal's conceptual apparatus in adequately explaining the 20th century development of Hungarian society, Erdei's procedure may easily be challenged. The best way of invalidating his highly popular dual structure theory is what Karl Popper falsification theory provides us. This demands not to verify, but more rather to falsify a theory by bringing out more and more empirical evidences which do not support the model. The author makes his best to do this in discussing the most diverse issues of Hungary's social history in the 20th century.