Gábor Vermes. Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1711–1848

This is a welcome addition to the study of political culture in Hungary during the early revolutionary era. Its primary objective is to modify the “glowing reputation” (331) of the so-called Age of Reform that Gábor Vermes argues has been mythologized by twentieth-century scholars who sought to counteract the depressing legacies of the Treaty of Trianon, fascism, and Stalinism. He does so with a leisurely but detailed analysis of the painfully slow and ultimately incomplete evolution of liberal ideas among the kingdom’s elites, which he attributes to a “feudal attachment to a sense of permanence” (336) that justified the pervasive indifference to the modernization process with the mantra extra Hungaricum non est vita. Except for the precious few countrymen who lived and studied in the West, Hungarian society was divided between the badly educated and the wholly ignorant. The yawning gap between noble landholders and their serfs constituted a second divide that posed the principal obstacle in the transition from feudal to liberal opposition to Habsburg rule.

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