ABSTRACT
Erwin Szabo started in political life as a Social Democrat, but he soon left that party whilst remaining a personal friend of its leaders. He feared, perhaps under the influence of his libertarian readings, that the social democracy would fall under state control by participating in parlamentary struggles. German social democracy, with its theorists and politicians, was Szabo's pet aversion. Paul Szende, the "Galileist" secretary of the treasury of the Kàrolyi government, became a Social Democrat. Szende started out as a historian with a study he had planned while in law school on the topic of Hungarian city life in the late Middle Ages. According to Paul Szende the process of abstraction occupies a privileged position among the mechanisms of mystification; a propensity for the concrete characterizes the nonmystified political consciousness. In contrast to Szende, the philosopher Béla Fogarasi took an opposite, much more picturesque path. Between 1925 and 1944 Fogarasi contributed to various Communist monthlies.
