A short history of Hungarian political and legal thought

A general characteristic of Hungarian political and legal thought is that it has fitted in the West European way of progress, but it also lagged behind in a certain degree. This characteristic feature could be related to the lagging of the development of the Hungarian society as a whole. In the field of political and legal thought it precisely meant that certain scientific tendencies, which had already spread in the western world arose historically later in our country. Actually, the beginning of Hungarian political thought may be assigned to the reign of King St. Stephen and it can be traced through the works of the great Hungarian politicians /Gábor Bethlen, Miklós Zrínyi, Ferenc Rákóczi II. etc./ until the development of reformist notions at the end of the XVIIIth century. Although the views of Machiavelli and others were effective already in the first half of the 1600s, the results of the European political and legal sciences have been admitted by the Hungarian political and legal thought just since the Enlightenment. Although, sometimes they were interpreted in a peculiar way on behalf of the analysis of national problems or even of certain political endeavours. Undoubtedly, the absolutistic efforts of the Habsburg dynasty filtered the political literature spread in the Hungarian region, nevertheless, for example Montesquieu's work on the spirit of laws sometime in the middle of the XVIIIth century was accessible - in Latin translation - in Hungary, too. The doctrine of social agreement spread even in Rousseau's version. In. East Europe, consequently in Hungary as well, beside the French, the English and the Italian Enlightenment the German 'version' had a special role both as a 'mediator' and as a 'direct model', too. A general characteristic of Hungarian political and legal thought setting out in the reform era was liberalism, which due to the local situation took specially modified shapes. The conservative political science and philosophy of law evolved after the downfall of the 1848-49 revolution and war of independence. After the turn of the century Hungarian political and legal thought progressed on, but kept its original features like for example, the linkage to the tasks of the Hungarian social-political development In this the issue of relation between external models and internal potentialities often emerge. The /psychological, sociological, Neo-Kantian and moralist/ Hungarian philosophy of law had began to live its golden age that time, and it ceased only at the end of World War II.