ABSTRACT
Hungary is one of those European societies for which the statistical flows of father-to-son social mobility are best established. The growth of total intergenerational mobility, and the relatively high level of total mobility in the post-war decades, have been primarily due to the rapid structural changes in Hungarian society which followed industrialization. The life histories from Ferenc's family do help us to understand the apparent contradiction between the empirical results of social mobility surveys, and current opinion concerning the fate of the Hungarian bourgeoisie and professional class during and after the war. While the economic situation of each generation is certainly better than that of the previous one, it is much less clear that this improvement can be characterized as upward social mobility. As Daniel Bertaux stated, a methodological pluralism is especially desirable in the study of social mobility processes.
