ABSTRACT
This study is dedicated to István Bibó (1911–1979), who was a political scientist and thinker, not a historian, although history was an essential part of his work.1 It is not only that as a political scientist he made use of his exceptional historical knowledge and the sensitivity of his inferences, nor is it even that in devising exceptionally acute diagnoses of the last century he created a self-standing historical oeuvre. There is more to it than that. He set an example for historians by recognizing that the frameworks that exist behind historical events play a critically important role over the course of a long period of time, which also help the present to identify political courses of action and set limitations. Unfortunately, Bibó never reached his objective, but the essence of his work lies between a sober definition of limits and a maximalist analysis of the possibilities that present-day reality has to offer: what could or should be done to augment the prospects of a society whose historical and structural limitations have fueled a demand for a revolution and for democratic transformation when history is charged with responding to this demand under non-revolutionary conditions? In terms of longterm opportunities and constraints, István Bibó described Hungarian history as a sequence of three phases. Expressed simply: in the first 500 years after the turn of the millennium this society belonged to the West according to its societal framework, or at any rate close, “with only a difference of degree” and in “a fairly simplified context, with provincial characteristics.” But this tie with the West was broken by historical catastrophes and for more than 400 years it was forced to follow an Eastern European type of development marked by “inertia within the power relations of society,” “deadlocks,” and hopeless attempts to return to the West. These attempts continued until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when they arrived at a strange “impasse.” Bibó believed that in 1945 it was possible to transcend this impasse and to “reunite itself with Western social evolution.” The heart of his work consists in gauging the opportunities and constraints that escaping from a “history of impasses” would entail.2
