The CEU Institute for Advanced Study is pleased to invite you to its next fellow seminar.
IAS Faculty Fellow, András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science at the CEU will give a talk on
Voice, Choice, and Withdrawal: The Political Roles of Intellectuals
Venue: Nador 13, Room 001
29 January, 11.00. a.m.
Intellectuals might have different roles in society but one of their most prominent activities is to
participate in public discussion and thus to influence public opinion and policy formation. Sometimes,
especially at times of radical political change, intellectuals play extraordinarily influential roles in politics
while in „normal times” they focus on their own profession. My aim here is to reconstruct the
transformation of intellectuals’ roles in a decade when they played unusually influential role: It occurred
in Hungary between 1982 and 1993. During this period of time three different roles are identified: 1.
Delegitimizing the autocratic regime by the power of „culture of critical discourse” over the 1980s; 2.
Participating at the historic Roundtable Talks and entering party politics – and, by doing so, playing the
roles of founder, legislator, and professional (1989-90); Finally, 3. the return from party politics to the
movement scene in civil society by formulating general democratic standards vis-a-vis democratic party
politics (1991-93). This third period represents the process of slow withdrawal from the front-line of
politics by displaying new roles as movement-intellectuals, univerzalist critics and professionals. Ideas of
Benda, Gramsci, Mannheim, Gouldner, Bauman and Eyerman & Jamison will be contrasted and analyzed
in the given historical context. The research is based on qualitative methods i.e. analysis of the samizdat
literature, interviews, manifestos and other written forms of political discourse.
András Bozóki is faculty fellow at IAS, Professor of Political Science at the Central European University.
He received his PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1992. He has published widely in topics
of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, East-Central European politics,
the transformation of communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism.