Ilona Sármány writes on the great Rippl-Rónai show this summer. She argues that József Rippl-Rónai, who lived and painted in the late 19th and early 20th century, had no part of the folksy-Magyar stylistic innovations of his time, nor did he keep company with utopian social reformers. He was not interested in abstract ideas or principles but was committed to the real world and life as it was lived. His work had two connected leitmotifs: women and an aesthetically humanised, that is feminised, world, and the family home and its extension, the garden. In this he radically differs from his contemporaries in Hungary. With great virtuosity he lends permanency to the emotional charm of decorativity but all this merely stands for a tegument on the outside. Deep down the subject is a human being’s relation to another, to a companion, and one’s place in the world as being implanted in a home. It was not a matter of choice for him to paint "the soul" or "the material," they were both incarnations of different forms or states of being of one and the same essence. As regards colour and form he had five basically different periods but behind them all there is an essentially barely changing sensitive soul that varies the tools it uses while keeping its image of the world unchanged. His work poetically tells of a bitter-sweet life, sweet in essence but with a touch of sadness. His brush, like noone else’s, shows country life in Hungary around 1900 to have been sunny, sentimental, rich and peaceful.

Dénes Némedi presumes that all those who think of social conflicts primarily in terms of conflict management will be irritated by Axel Honneth’s essays which have now appeared in Hungarian under the title Elismerés és megvetés (Esteem and disdain). Much ado about nothing. It is not news after all that men feel incensed when someone offends their personal or communal identity, that the exclusion that goes with unemployment not only offends against social and economic interests but also one’s honour, that conflicts are not all due to bread and butter issues, that the welfare state cannot rest content with filling empty mouths. According to Némedi Honneth discovers nothing new about insults and contempt, all he tries to do is to provide a theoretical framework for all we know about insults and injuries and conflicts, and what we intimate about that moral infrastructure which we call social integration. This is more than we would imagine at first hearing. Honneth’s work is evidence that neoliberalism and post-modern murky waters have not swept away modern critical theory, which is capable of renewal and will perhaps some time achieve that comprehensive view which, both Honneth and Némedi argue, is needed before we can truly once again speak of critical theory.

According to Bálint Somlyó, Jonathan Culler, in his Deconstruction had a go at something which Derrida, the fountainhead of deconstruction, never attempted, and very likely would not even want to try. Culler, perhaps not methodologically but methodically sums up all those principles which are at the bottom of deconstruction procedures. He leaves out of account that what Derrida produced were paradigms or parables of deconstruction and not treatises. His works are the masterly games of a celebrated player but without a book of rules. According to Somlyó, whether this truly refers to those principles which we call rules ex post facto reconstructed by him, or whether these rules, as origins, produce deconstructions manifest not in the expressed principles but in the infinite accumulations of letters of the texts. Somlyó objects that Culler takes shortcuts from the origins to the results, forgetting that the texts of deconstruction are meant to be read as major philosophical works.

Gábor Schein does not agree on principle with the essays on Hungarian-Jewish literature which he reviews. He argues that the assimilation of Jews in Hungary should be taken to be a contract in terms of which the Hungarian hosts agreed not to distinguish themselves from the Jewish guests, and the Jewish guests in turn agreed not to narrate their story in the context of another culture. But what the authors have tried to do–in Schein’s view mostly unsuccessfully–was to present the story of the contract or alliance in terms of a single parenthesis. As a result the offered variants: Jew of Hungary, Hungarian Jew, Jewish Hungarian etc. all loyally maintain the limit (or boundary, frontier if you like) of the title between "Hungarian" and "Jew," going on to do their damnest to enfeeble this boundary. According to Schein they fail because they want to present the difference as a limit or boundary. Abandoning the game of identity and difference, the narrative of the indigenous and the strangers, and their alliance, is presented in terms of the paradigm of the own and the other. The addresses collected in the volume all move in circles—some tight, some more ample—around an indescribable sign, a sign which makes manifest and narrates how on this particular spot in Europe, where our house stands, "Hungarian" includes "Jew" and "Jew" includes "Hungarian". A home can only be a home if it keeps an open house.

Gyôzô Vörös’s supposed discovery of the tomb of a pharaoh created quite a stir in Hungary recently, more even in the media than in the academies. Éva Liptay and Andrea Mayer find it odd that Vörös published his findings (A temple on the crown of Thebes) as well-publicised popular science. It was odder still that Vörös felt constrained to supply additional details in various interviews in newspapers and glossy journals. The media, with the author’s effective cooperation, presented the book as an archeological sensation. Vörös speaks of the "fantastic" circumstances of the "discovery," telling a variety of stories in different places. These stories in themselves should delight any student of comparative mythology. But is it really a discovery, and not perhaps a shocking piracy? According to Éva Liptay and Andrea Mayer the hollow or tomb was already discovered early this century. How come Vörös describes himself as the discoverer? Indeed, there are doubts that this hollow or cave was ever a tomb. Is there any evidence at all that it existed at the time of the pharaohs and that Mentuhotep Sanhkara of all people was buried there.

According to János László, after a relative silence that has lasted many years, the publication of books on social psychology has taken off with a vengeance. László judges the prospects to be good. With the end of Communism the last ideological taboos have disappeared. Hungarian social psychologists have exploited the opportunities offered by the "natural laboratory" of the social changes with great gusto, and their publications have boosted their international reputation. The motivation provided by direct experience of social upheaval may be on the wane but there is much that is new in a society that has undergone change that will require long term social psychological research. Suffice it to mention unemployment, states of social integration, gender roles or deviant behaviour. László draws attention to two new trends in theoretical work and in research. One is the relationship between individual and collective representations as a renewed theoretical problem. A revival of research into identity, collective memory, cultural semiotics and social representations should be mentioned in this connection. On the other hand there is more emphasis on evolutionary aspects and on sociobiology.

Csilla Mihalicz interviewed (now Former) Chairman of Hungary’s Constitutional Court during the last month of his 9-year-tenure on the court, which made history in Hungary in so many ways. Sólyom gives a detailed account of the forces at work when the idea of a constitutional court was first formulated during the talks between the opposition and the communist authorities, and sets out the philosophical and constitutional foundations of the court procedures, which shaped the rule of law and a working parliamentary democracy in this country. Sólyom stresses that the Court had to rely on what he calls the "unwritten constitution": abstract principles of legal interpretation which could establish e.g. the unconstitutionality of capital punishment from the constitutional clause stating that the chief and foremost task of the Hungarian State is to safeguard the inviolability of human personality and life. Sólyom recounts the set of decisions delineating the constitutional status of the president of the republic: head of state and commander in chief, without the prerogatives of executive power. As the interview was made before the last decision of the Sólyom-court, on abortion, this issue could not be raised in detail here.