Old hats and closet revisionists: reflections on Domokos Kosáry's latest work on the 1848 Hungarian revolution

The publication of Domokos Kosáry's Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849 offers an opportunity to examine Hungarian historians' changing views, since the Second World War, about that brilliant apogee of their country's history: the 1848 revolution. This book offers an overview of the whole subject which no other book written on a wide scale has offered in recent years, rather more than what its title promises. Its author is fully aware of the extent to which history can be understood as historiography and he critically discusses other historians' works. Moreover, Kosáry, the eighty-eight-year-old Nestor of Hungarian historians and the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has over the years earned the reputation of being the arch-revisionist of nineteenth-century Hungarian history. A convenient way to account for Kosáry's revisionist views is to explore first some traditional assumptions and views held about the subject and also their modifications over the years, before discussing Kosáry's work and reporting on where the argument stands today. Kosáry's revisionism has preyed on (if that is not an unkind description) two (partly overlapping) vocabularies of interpretation. Again, for convenience sake (and treading in the steps of geologists) I shall start with the still visible, because more recent, Marxist Old Hat vocabulary which rests on some older inveterate Independentist Old Hat assumptions that I shall review subsequently

The holy crown of Hungary, visible and invisible

The eight-hundred-years-old Crown of St Stephen (the visible crown) has engendered in Hungary a singular, genuine national tradition which has been more enduring than traditions accorded to regalia in other European countries. The recent revival of the tradition, without parallels elsewhere, begs an explanation. The existence of the visible crown has lent coherence to the uses of the term ‘crown’, which possesses multivocal meaning. Crown uses of political rhetoric have radically changed since 1790. Yet this subject has not been properly studied since Ferenc Eckhart's work published in 1941. The controversial and politically combustible ‘doctrine of the Holy Crown’ has been attributed by historians either to the sixteenth-century jurist Werbodblacczy or to the medieval period. This is a fallacy. It was, in fact, an innovation introduced by professors of the Law Faculty in Budapest after parliament's Great Defence Debate of 1889

R. W. Seton-Watson's changing views on the national question of the Habsburg monarchy and the European balance of power

R. W. Seton-Watson, the champion of the small nations, changed his attitudes towards them in accordance with what, he thought, the European balance of power required rather than with what the principle of national self-determination demanded. As a Germanophile, he was disturbed by the Pan-German aspirations which threatened the integrity of the Habsburg Monarchy and thence the European balance and security. This explains why in 1905–1906 Seton-Watson supported the Hungarian Independentists, then became ‘converted to dualism’ and later to trialism. After 1914 he abandoned the unreformable Monarchy, which had become an adjunct to Germany, and helped to create independent nation-states. Seton-Watson, like other liberals in Western Europe, supported the new frontiers, established after 1918, in which the principle of nationality was invariably subordinated to views on balance and security. The conflict between justice and stability in international relations appears to be intractable

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Turning Points in Pastoral Care: The Legacy of Anton Boisen and Seward Hiltner

Reviewed Book: Aden, LeRoy. Turning Points in Pastoral Care: The Legacy of Anton Boisen and Seward Hiltner. Grand Rapids: Baker Bk House, 1990. Psychology and Christianity; 4