Civilization and originality: perceptions of history and national specificity in nineteenth-century Hungarian political discourse

Abstract

The article is an overview of the development of Hungarian cultural-political discourses focusing on the notion of ‘national specificity’ during the nineteenth century. It seeks to link these conceptual developments to the transformation of the underlying vision of historicity and that of the socio-political context of nation-building, caused by such collective experiences as the ‘national revival’ or the 1848-49 Revolution. It argues that in the process practically all the key ideological stances changed their content. While at the beginning of the nineteenth century conservatives were supra- and often anti-nationalist, by the end of the century they developed their own specific ‘national conservatism’. Similarly, the relationship of liberalism and nationalism underwent a fundamental reconfiguration, and by the end of the period the ‘liberal nationalist’ ideology practically disintegrated. Reconstructing the complex conceptual itinerary of the notions of national specificity thus serves as a litmus test for grasping the ways Hungarian national discourse changed over the century and also offers a conceptual framework for a broader trans-regional analysis of romantic and post-romantic nationalism.