Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison by John A. Hall

Author:John A. Hall
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

MORALITY

It is important to consider how these spheres of politics and economics have interacted in different ways in different parts of Eastern Europe, but it is also essential everywhere to add another dimension. The concept of civil society must also direct our attention to the study of values, to the study of moralities in society. This too has been of major concern in the Hungarian literature on polgárosodás. Although the primary associations of the term, certainly in the village, would be material and economic, for many urban and intellectual groups it is also strongly associated with the spread of ‘bourgeois’ educational and moral standards or, in other English terms all derived from the same root, the spread of civilization, civic consciousness and civility.

It is quite clear that the values of the many commentators and dissident East European intellectuals who have presented civil society in a simple adversarial relationship with the socialist state are the values of Western bourgeois (or liberal) individualism. It is less clear that these values are or have ever been espoused in the same way and to the same degree by East European villagers. Superficially there are of course points of contact. The peasant who has his land appropriated in the course of collectivization is easily recruited to the private property rights tradition of John Locke. But even when Hungarian villagers did hold the land as parcels of private real estate, as most of them did in Tazlar, this was a comparatively recent development and it should not be misinterpreted. It did not mean absolute rights for private individuals: the rights were thought by villagers to be held by families rather than by their individual members. Even in areas of scattered settlement such as Tazlar, villagers acknowledged the ‘moral economy’ of their community, which constrained the behaviour of individual members. Thus the ‘individualism’ of the pre-socialist community was qualified by a broad moral tradition, within which the constraints and responsibilities systematically inculcated by the various churches were probably the most significant factor.

The imposition of communism was clearly an intervention that was rejected by the mass of the peasantry: the collectivism of communist morality had nothing in common, so it seemed, with the moral economy of the village. Communism, so this argument goes, destroyed the fabric of the traditional society. But this collectivist system, paradoxically, then proceeded to encourage individualism and self-exploitation. The consequent emergence of dynamic entrepreneurs and development of limited private property rights in the era of ‘market socialism’ is then presented in terms of corruption and anomie. Communism, rather than weave elements of individualism back into a system of collective morality, only further undermined its own claims to moral legitimation through the encouragement of the new, ‘anything goes’ polgárosodás. The moral consequences are typically represented as especially dire when sudden wealth is bestowed upon previously poor villagers. I came across such attitudes frequently during my years in Budapest.

My own analysis is quite different. First, the extent to which the market socialist economy stimulated only selfishness should not be exaggerated.

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