Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.

A major shortcoming in the history of early modern political philosophy in Hungary is the lack of political reflection on an abstract level and the low impact of theory on political canon. Due to these factors even existing theoretical works fail to enter the collective memory of the political community. One of the possible solutions for this problem is to bring the history of political philosophy closer to contemporary social and political practices and explore the layers of the political thinking of the day through a contextual interpretation of the texts of the quotidian. Both the limitations of generalisation and the necessary contingencies of narration must be considered in this type of examination of the history of political philosophy. Embedded in a biographical framework, the analysis of the Szemere case is an attempt to offer exactly this type of analysis of the history of politology. Placed in the context of early modern political thinking in Hungary, the study examines the documents of a secondary episode in the wave of repression following the Jacobin trials. The defence testimonies of a member of the gentry initially charged with treason offer an insight into the various layers of this political thinking, as well as the influence of legal hermeneutics, Stoic ethics, the tenets of forma regiminis, classic republicanism, Hungarian poetic traditions and a fundamentally conservative image of enlightenment.

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.