This study examines the institutionalization and disciplinary self-conception of social history writing in Hungary from a Sociology of Science perspective, focusing on the period between the 1960s and 2025. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory and Thomas F. Gieryn’s concept of Boundary-Work, it analyses how social history emerged as a distinct subfield within Hungarian historiography and how its narratives of legitimation have evolved across political and institutional contexts. Based on the narrative analysis of public professional statements, programmatic writings, and responses to survey inquiries, the research compared three key moments (1996–1997, 2001, 2025) using a qualitative methodology. The analysis demonstrates that the institutionalization of the social history field has largely taken place over recent decades, and while its boundaries have stabilized, they remain subject to ongoing renegotiation. Statements from 2025 are particularly sensitive indicators of the erosion of the social authority of science and the increase of political intervention, both of which pose new challenges for social history as a reflexive and critical form of knowledge.

Throughout the history of Hungarian sociology, there have been many attempts to build a robust institutional network, and the most successful one, whose institutional framework remains definitive to this date, took place in the 1960s and 1970s. It was around this time when the first academic research group – later Research Institute for Sociology – was launched, followed by the first university departments, scholarly journals and learned societies. After the 1956 revolution, the institutionalization of sociology was tied to the Kádár Era consolidation in the 1960s, which undoubtedly carried the promise of increased independence of the subsystems of society, the depolitization of everyday life, and of satisfying the society’s need of consumerism and modernization. Such efforts in Hungary, as part of the Soviet Empire, were deeply impacted by global power alignment and legitimization struggles, which, from the 1950s onwards, increasingly shifted to the scientific domains of economy and technology. The study focuses on the antecedents, founding, and operation of the Sociology Research Unit at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences after 1963, then its eventual institutionalization in 1968. The aim of the study is to find out what role the contemporary reform efforts played in the process of institutionalization and the legitimization of sociology as a discipline. How was the professionalization of sociology viewed and by whom, what arguments helped or hampered the representatives of the discipline within academia and the political regime or from a social perspective in the broadest sense? The study also examines the ways in which the modernization ideology adopted by the state influenced the knowledge production of sociology: picking the questions to be debated and selecting the research methodologies as well as individual and institutional research strategies.