Péter Debreczeni Bárány’s life is an example for a peculiar career type around the turn of the eighteenth century. At first sight, Bárány, a Catholic man of wide social network connections and a past overshadowed by troubles with censorship, seems to have had an atypical career, especially in the light of comparing and contextualising his political oeuvre and career. At the same time, examining his political writings in the light of his social and political functions may also provide insight into the characteristics of the political thinking of the age. Bárány’s life history shows the possibilities and limitations of microhistorical research into intellectual history. It sheds light on how social and intellectual history may merge in the analysis of a non-canonical figure of a given historical period and how this may affect our understanding of the canon. This entails research into the history of ideas, the adaptation mechanisms of the period and a peculiar mixture of political idioms. A perfect example for all these is a translation by Bárány, which reflects an interesting concept of Enlightenment and an unusual interpretation of political and social order.

The aim of this study is to make some reflections concerning the connection between a segment of the German Begriffsgeschichte and the so-called “nationalism theories”. The article “Folk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse”, which is one of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriff e’ longest articles, makes some fundamental statements about the national phenomenon and it seems to be interesting to look at the historiographic background of these statements by examining the impressive historiographic references used by the authors. In doing so, we can see that Koselleck and his co-authors make their conclusions without or rarely citing the the anglo-saxon works that are traditionally considered as the most relevant results of the theories of nationalism (especially the modernist and the ethnosymbolist perspectives). The fact that the authors of the article barely cite the anglo-saxon literature is even more interesting due to the considerable similarities and overlappings. These similarities involve for instance the genesis of nationalism and the concept of nation, the typology of these concepts, or the problem of the creation and transfers of the notions in question. Despite the fact that the method of Begriffsgeschichte is becoming a more and more important approach in the empirical researches concerning the national phenomenon, a lot of theoretical questions arise. This study tries to highlight the possible perspectives of such theoretical researches.

The authors of the paper argue that it might be worth rethinking some aspects of the 18th century Hungarian political literature from several points of view, mostly based on new approaches and results of the international historiography.After a short introduction and some methodological reflections on the relevanceof some results of the Hungarian and international historiography, the article focuses on the most characteristic features of the complex social and political conditions of Hungary in the 18th century, since this complexity contributed heavily to the nature of the political discourses of the epoch. Among the most important factors are for instance the confessional separation, education, and other aspects of the local social-cultural influences and conditions. Furthermore, this chapter aims to focus on the possibilities of using and combining some findings of the so-called contextualist and conceptual history methods. In the empirical part of the article, the authors demonstrate the main discursive strategies of early-modern nationalism in the period which marks an early phase of Hungarian nation-building. The second example focuses on the key concepts of the political order, showing the pertinence of the question from the angle of the history of ideas. These examples are presented through a mostly unpublished collection of political writings of the eighteenth century. The article accentuates the peculiarities of the discursive space of the region, the complexity and ambiguity of certain concepts, or, in other words, some important dilemmas of the genesis of the modern socio-political vocabulary in early-modern Hungary.

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.