János Kornai’s On the reform of the health services is reviewed from two different points of view, by János Weltner, a medical practitioner, and Péter Mihályi, an economist. Both agree with Kornai that a radical reform is indeed needed, since the Hungarian state health services have proved unable to keep up with the world wide price explosion produced by changes in medical technology and pharmaceutical production and the corresponding growing expectations on the part of patients. Dr Weltner draws attention to additional factors that contributed to the price explosion, such as insurance and administrative costs, plus malpractice suits, and as their consequence, the costs of liability insurance. Weltner, like Kornai, favours an integrated insurance system that offers patients a free choice of doctors and institutions. But there is much on which Weltner chooses to differ. He thinks Kornai is mistaken in believing that in Hungary it is still the state which finances the health services. In fact, the state having withdrawn, financing is the business of employers and employees. Dr Weltner warns against many of Kornai’s proposals. He is against health contributions being treated as taxes, against a domination by commercial insurers, who are more expensive, against voluntary insurance, which produces less revenues than compulsory insurance since many would opt out. He doubts that Kornai’s basic proposition, that individuals should decide on their own welfare expenditure, could be effective since the majority of Hungarians are at present not in a position to accumulate savings of any significance. Mihályi, as an economist, is much closer to Kornai in his thinking. Mihályi notes that thirty years after Kornai first argued against excessive centralisation, his latest work makes the same points about a bureaucratic planned economy, the waste of resources, the neglect of consumer preferences, in other words ongoing socialism at least in the health services. According to Mihályi there is no doubt that in the Hungarian health services basic relations, social power structures and personal contacts are linked to the past by a thousand threads and that these threads are thicker and stronger than in other fields. Whole industries have disappeared between 1989 and 1998 and new ones have replaced them, the property structure of agriculture has changed radically etc. but in the health services not much has changed. Insurers in a monopoly situation, far too many doctors, superfluous beds, unjustifiably low salaries, and the tipping system. According to Mihályi Kornai’s is a key work. There is no doubt that most of the medical profession tend to doubt what Kornai has to say and to be dismissive of his work. Radical reforms are, however, unavoidable, and we are only at the start of a long process.

László Székely’s A cosmos with a human face tells the story of anthropic cosmology, of its various formulations and of objections to them. The book goes on to discuss related epistemological and ontological problems, finally placing the theory in the context of the history of philosophy. According to Péter Szegedi, Székely unfortunately exaggerates the role of the anthropic principle in contemporary science. The anthropic principle assets that key characteristics of the universe are tuned to make human exitence possible. Szegedi, however, advocates a contrary approach: man has need of the stars, the stars, however, have no need of man. Albeit the universe happens to be suitable for us, the observers, as it is not meaningful to ask how probable among other setups of the universe this particular one is, the formulation of the anthropic principle remains idle and cannot reach its major purpose — to shore up the distinguished place of man in the universe, and to back the notion of divine providence. Szegedi stresses this is far from being the mainstream of science.

Csaba Pléh writes on the symbolism of Hungarian psychology in the sixties. What he endeavours to show is that both in their symbolic aspects and through the causal chains they display, scientific theories become part of the social world together with the interests which implicitly define them.How does this appear in a situation where the central will, making use of science policy, gives weight to its own symbolism? As a result an alternative symbolism takes shape which in a hidden way questions the dominant views whose hegemony was officially proclaimed. All this happened in the midst of mutual mystifications, as a result the coded message of those in revolt was difficult to unmask by those in power. In the sixties the problems of activity were reckoned to be central to psychology. Two approaches to behaviour and to human nature as a whole confronted each other. Officially, conditioning of the Pavlov kind had to come out on top in psychology, but in current debate the symbolisation of passive sensing, mirroring, and single-channel tracks was confronted by a dynamic, active view, and the symbols of instrumental learning and active motor perception and models. Those in revolt suggested an image where man was not simply a being absorbing information and knowledge under “Russian and Prussian” control, but an active seeker of knowledge. Dissense, however, was formulated in two groups, one of experimental psychologists, the other of neo-Marxist theoreticians. These were suspicious of each other. They both argued that the other renounced true freedom in the name of new limitations.

How credible is historical research based on personal documents, journals kept, the recall of men and women, and all that goes under the name of oral history, what purposes does it serve, what is it good for. That is the question Gábor Gyáni’s “Memory and oral history” puts to himself. Most historians would doubt that such sources give us a valid image of what really happened. Gyáni, however, argues for their careful and considerate exploitation. What this produces is an implicit welding of myth and reality. Historians are thus given a privileged look on the way the individual and the collective consciousness shaped the past, on processes in which facts and the imagination, the present and the past, all played their part. This makes possible a historiography which can pay proper attention to the strength of traditions (collective myths) while being fully aware of the relativity of the validity of its own narrative constructions.

Measures and Proportions in Peasant Economy by Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer is a classic of ethnography, translated into a number of languages, which has at long last, with a thirty years’ delay, appeared in the original Hungarian. The methodology is that of participant observation. Field work over a period of some fifteen years meant keeping in touch with fifty to sixty families, taking part in their working life and leisure, their family and communal celebrations, their joys and sorrows. Photographs were taken, conversations were pencilled, the moment was seized in its spontaneous manifestations. This book serves as the subject of the Notice by Many Hands in the present issue.

As one of the reviewers points out the immediate influence of the book on Hungarian research was small. The more open methods of social anthropology were unable to make headway. It was already clear at the time of the field work that the way of life to be recorded was about to vanish soon. This was the time of forced collectivisation but the authors did not study how it affected the village. What they recorded was a previous state, the traditional Hungarian village, that appeared as an integral whole in comparison with the given present. As another reviewer shows their aim was reconstruction, they wished to seize what was about to pass. They did not identify with conventional and authoritative schools of thought, albeit they made use of their methodologies, which they based on broader foundations, making good use of the instrumental armoury of modern museology, archeology, statistics, sociology and cultural anthropology.

The reviewers, however, unanimously insist that future chroniclers of their science will treat Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer’s work as a milestone in the history of 20th century social anthropology.