ABSTRACT
Many years ago Géza Perjés introduced the notion of “national self-esteem (or alternatively: public sensibility) disorder” into the debate about nationalism, together with diagnostic criteria and therapeutic recommendations; noteworthy in many respects, but provoking contradiction in other dimensions.1 It would be foolish in principle to deny the existence of certain disorders, especially as regards the diverging visions on history where differences of opinion are framed with a special emphasis; discussions over the past decade have provided a good many examples of that by now. All these confusions not only in self-esteem and general disposition but also in notions and attitudes did not arise in recent years, but long before. Old psychological conditioning and habits of thought, often appearing in a new pattern or form, continue to have an impact; inherited frames of mind and vicious circles of logic burden public discourse and historical consciousness today. Not long ago I devoted a book to the analysis of this phenomenon,2 in which, addressing the neuralgic points and zones of the debate—with regard, among other things, to “pre-national” forms of consciousness and popular patriotism—I attempted to find more solid conceptual starting points and historical answers. My ideas were perhaps debatable; nevertheless, it does not help matters any if misunderstandings turn into the focus of a controversy, with the neuralgic spots of the debate needlessly proliferating through the addition to the existing disorders in “public sentiment” and concepts of a new one: a functional disturbance in the debate. Sadly, the latest contribution to this historical controversy, the concluding part of an extensive historical essay recently published by Géza Perjés,3 is itself not free from this kind of malady, precisely at those very same neuralgic spots where he takes issue with alleged assertions from my work mentioned above.
