Mircea Eliade is fashionable in a different way. Péter Zirkuli discusses his life and work with a thoroughness that deserves the title Eliade from A to Z, or rather, more appropriately, Eliade from alpha to omega. Allow me to quote Zirkuli's first paragraph which indicates that the modesty of expression conceals the intent to understand and present the whole Eliade. "What I am attempting is to use a number of Mircea Eliade's autobiographical and scholarly writings as well as criticisms of his work to establish what views this Rumanian writer and French-American (after tentative beginnings in Bucharest - Paris and Chicago) university teacher held on historicity and modernity as problems. Did he put forward any proposals which permitted a more precise survey of these knotty issues? What are the theoretical and anthropological foundations of his argument, and what is the relationship between theory and his political position?" Such questions are truly tackled and answered by Zirkuli, I venture the suggestion that, for many years to come, his article will be a basic source and reference in Eliade studies.

  The publication of Hungarian translations of two thirty to forty year old writings by Chomsky (Syntactic Structures and Language and Mind) prompted László Kálmán to examine what in Chomsky's theory of language stood the test of time, and what was merely fashionable. Noam Chomsky was mentioned with bated breath in the Hungary of the late sixties, much as Mircea Eliade is today. Kálmán provocatively calls him a champion of scientific roguery. Allow me to quote to show that there is something in Kálmán's argument. "One of Chomsky's favourite trains of thought is that children dispose over insufficient data to serve as a learning aid. The interest of this argument is that Chomsky uses it to shore up his theory of innateness, Chomsky argues that learning a language presupposes an innate mechanism that is independent of other intellectual faculties. There is, however, no evidence - either direct or indirect - to back this assertion. Indeed the only argument in the volume is that the conventional behaviorist theory of learning is, allegedly, unable to account for the acquisition of language skills. To my mind such arguments belong to the wheatfield circles category. As we all know mysterious circles (burn-marks?) appear in wheatfields from time to time. So far, there has been no scientific explanation. Every one put forward has been too involved and highly improbable. No one has observed the genesis of these circles. But there is a simple and striking explanation: that Unidentified Flying Objects approach the Earth through an opening on the surface of the Moon, leaving a circular mark when landing on wheatfields. There are numerous ways in which such a model can be motivated, nor has anyone been able to deny that something like that took place. What I am trying to suggest is that Chomsky, albeit he presumes linguistics to be a science, in his style of argumentation behaves like a denizen of the New Age." It would not surprise me if the Chomsky camp, which is strong in Hungary, is going to react forcefully.

  József Saád discusses Roger Scruton's 1984 The Meaning of Conservativism, recently translated into Hungarian, in conjunction with a selection of writings by contemporary Hungarian conservatives. He is scatting about the latter, but not simply in comparison with Scruton's work. A far more important criterion is provided by 19th century Hungarian conservative writings, with which Saád is thoroughly familiar. It is in defence of the high standards of that conservative tradition that Saád feels forced to object to the recent selection.

  BUKSZ will of course draw attention to the superficiality of a publication whatever its political line. Péter Pete's subject is a book haunted by the socialist past. György Földes, who heads the Institute of Political History, set out to tell the story of how the debt of the Hungarian economy grew and grew between 1957 and 1990. According to Pete, Földes confines himself to a superficial survey of the politics of debt, going no further than detailing CP documents. As Pete puts it: "A discussion of debt making use of the resolutions of the Political Committee of the CP is important and interesting. But such an analysis tells us more about the Political Committee than about either the world or about the country's debt."

József Szabadfalvi:
Towards a pure sociology of law
Barna Horváth: "Rechtssoziologie" in Hungarian

András Kappanyos:
Delayed pioneering
Pál Nagy: New genres

Zoltán Szántó:
Politics and economics
Albert O. Hirschman: "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" in Hungarian

Imre Fertő:
A textbook in agricultural economics
Michael Tracy: "Food and Agriculture in a Market Economy" in Hungarian

Two views of Buda villas
Ilona Rév ; Béla Pazár
András Ferkai: Building in Buda between the Wars

János Kelemen:
The Rosicrucean Dante
René Guénon: "L'ésotérisme de Dante" in Hungarian

József Saád:
The many faces of conservativism
Roger Scruton: "The Meaning of Conservativism" in Hungarian
Through conservative eyes '94. Ed. by Tünde Vajda

József Sisa
Lapis Angularis
Sources from the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Architecture

Antal Szántay
Zimányi Vera (ed.): Time-piece, sabre, couch
Life-style and material culture in the 17th and 18th Hungary

András Bródy
Közép-Európa lobotómiája
Social Studies of Science. Vol. 25. No. 4.

Ambrus Miskolczy
Petre P. Panaitescu: Rumanian Interpretations

Vilmos Heiszler
Francois Fejtő: "La social-democratie quand-même" in Hungarian

Zsuzsa Borszéki
Ádám Török: Market and protection of industry
Essays from the period of economic change

György Róbert Lukács
Social time - time off. Leisure in contemporary society

Ágnes Deák
László Szarka: Slovak national development - Hungarian minorities policy 1867-1918

Alina Mungiu
Nationalism of hard times

Judit Lakner
Daedalus