Literati’s health and illness as metaphors of the reflections to the modernity in the 19th-century Hungarian intellectual history

The present paper offers a description of several trends of the mental history of the 19th-century Hungarian intelligentsia as special answers to the questions of modernity and modernization. The often usage of the metaphors of health and illness in the public discourse of the researched epoch both in politics and in the cultural life is a form of the description of the problems of modernity and modernization. This paper offers an analysis of the differences between the approaches of modernity and modernization in the period of the Hungarian Controversy on Kant (1792–1822), in the Hungarian Reform Era (1825–1848), in the time of neo-absolutism (1849–1867), and in the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918), including the first post-war reflections to this period. It will be continuously focused on the usage of the metaphors of health and illness, connected with the description of the types, and possible roles of the intelligentsia, embedded in the discourse about the characteristics, types, roles, virtues and weaknesses of the Hungarian cities. By the hypothesis of the author, the complex of the abovementioned problems can be interpreted within a framework of the structural turn of the scholar public sphere used by the intelligentsia, from the point of view of the history of philosophy, including the interpretation of the theoretical reflections to the communicational turn in the past

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Intelligentsia · Late 19th century · Modernity · Modernization theory · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · French Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy