Since 1989, Hungary has seen many of its research economists turn to politics and take office. One of them explains this desertion of the profession by pointing out that current developments are too rapid to be researched in depth, and that data are often inaccessible: at best, the work of today's social scientists can be classed as good journalism. László Bruszt was himself one of the Velvet Revolution's "amateur" politicians. He was one of the founders of the Democratic League of Independent Unions and their representative at the 1989 Round Table negotiations, but after this brief distraction he returned to teaching and research. [...]
Bruszt's stint as an active politician has left its mark on his theoretical writings. The ideas proclaimed in 1989 are beginning, if obliquely, to appear in writings on the Kádár regime, which tell of the informal lobbying of economic interest groups opposed to the wishes of the authorities and of the appearance of special interests in the formally centralized decision-making system. Bruszt would like to see the realization of these same ideas in post-socialist systems. The keywords for this can be found in the introduction to "Reforming Alliances: Labor, Management and State Bureaucracy in Hungary's Economic Transformation": the statist position on East-Central European transformation holds that the direction of its economic program must be entrusted to the state bureaucracy, and this must be isolated from the influence of interest groups. Advocates of negotiated transformation, meanwhile, claim that "all of the major economic actors should be empowered, and the key to the success of transformative politics is the establishment of effective negotiating mechanisms, including, among others, the key economic actors in the formation of transformative policies."1 It is fair to say that this is a pretty radical program-so radical it is hard to find theoretical support for it. Although this part of the work summarizes the transition literature (also implying that Transition Studies are the successor to Sovietology), it is clear that "negotiated transformation" is a value embraced by Bruszt himself rather than an allusion to the literature although referring to the post-Franco Spanish transition was commonplace in political argument on a topic such as the "social pact" in Hungary at the time. When applying the "negotiated transformation" theory to the economic changes in East-Central Europe, Bruszt refers exclusively to sociological literature (and to Iván Szelényi in particular). His starting point is the claim that due to the structure of group interests in society, the reformers could find allies who-if only in expectation of long-term advantages-accepted and even supported their reform efforts. He openly admits that as a rule he is a believer in the negotiated-consensual system of relations. At the same time, Bruszt is never short of quotes from statists, who earlier argued that the reforms' unpleasant social implications meant that they would have to be forced upon the peoples of the "weak democracies" and also from the newer trend, which tends to stress the differences between political and economic arrangements in particular countries and the characteristics of their different styles of transformation.
László Bruszt is widely recognized by his Hungarian colleagues as an expert on Western European corporatist systems; he published a large number of works on the theory of corporatism in the mid-Eighties, in particular on the Austrian interest reconciliation system. As we know, it was precisely the institutional implications of the welfare state that one of the leading themes of Political Science literature in the Seventies and Eighties, the so-called "Corporatism Debate," tried to establish. Despite his background as a student of Western corporatism, Bruszt locates his work in the liberal, economically reformist branch of Hungarian political sociology. For Bruszt, economic liberalism and the fundamentally social-democratic twentieth-century European conception of participation (whether direct popular participation or the corporatist-style inclusion of interest groups in the political system) are equally important traditions.
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