Learning from the Budapest School women

The substantive chapters conclude with some reflections on what we might learn from the contrasting approaches of two East European feminists to the politics of need interpretation. Coming to Australia’s struggling welfare democracy in the late 1970s from Hungarian communism’s ‘dictatorship over needs’, Agnes Heller and Maria Markus brought some important insights of the stranger to their new home. This chapter will contrast the critical power of Heller’s reflections on ‘radical needs’ with Markus’s distinctive diagnosis of the radical potentials of the ‘politicization of needs’.