ABSTRACT
State socialism is bankrupt in Eastern Europe. Governments, ruling parties, parties of the opposition, experts, and expert committees are desperately searching, at least in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, for a new paradigm, a new social and economic model with which to launch these countries onto a new course of dynamic development. This chapter focuses on the role the principles play in one East European society, in Hungary. Having several organizational principles, or logics, at work in a society is not peculiar to Hungary or to East European socialist societies in general. The fact that the political and the sociocultural systems within a society do not necessarily harmonize with one another has been well known since Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The elite, with its Utopian plans, attacked society, and society in turn tried to elude these attacks or to neutralize their negative effects as much as possible.
