In the early modern political conversation a very important new element was that a growing publicity paid attention to the news published in printed newspapers, weekly magazines and broadsheets. Beside the decision makers and political elite even the middle class citizens became well informed and competent, so the state power had to consider their opinion.

 

 

 

The fact that not even democracy may exist without power always meant an un-resolvable theoretical challenge to every social theorist. Liberals were committed to the notion of the perpetual widening of the political rights of the citizens, the Marxists, however, declared the necessary can-cellation of the state rule through the revolution of the proletariat. The elite theory appearing inthe late 19th and early 20^th century (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto) was pioneering in acknowledging that the democratic governments owing to their elite rule are also oligarchies. Joseph Schumpeter in correcting this argument has contended that democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them. Democracy is thus achieved through the free competition among the would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate. In a recent study the author describes the trajectory of an incessantly changing elite formation in Hungary in the age both of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Horthy era.

 

 

The government commissariat was a unique institution of the 1848-1849 Revolution and War of Independence in Hungary. It lasted for one and a half years and was the specfic creation of the revolutionary administration. The commissariat served as a liaison between the executive power and the local administrative machinery until September 1848. Then after the resignation of the Batthyány government, and owing to the transformation of the executive power (National Defence Committee), both the legislative and executive branches helped to develop the commissariat. In its origins and significance, the new system differed both from its feudal antecedents in Hungary and from the deputies on mission system of the French Revolution.

 

 Keywords: Habsburg rule, Transylvania, memoire writers

 

The presentation of the consequences referring to the political and institutional system of the Habsburg Rule by Hungarian memoire writers of the same period happens in different shapes and depending on the scale of the consolidation of the ruling. At the same time we may observe that these changes concerned mainly those memoire writers who are directly involved of the changes. It is quite occurring that the presentation of the political consequences of the Habsburg rule in the initial period of the integration is more emphasised. During the years and the expansion of the Austrian rule, when the position of Transylvania (and within that the upper classes) seems to lack any alternative, the memoirs tend to deal with the implementation of these political aims, their influence on the society, as well as the administrative, financial and legal reforms. These topics are treated only if and when they represent a certain change within the traditional structures and organization. In the memoirs the allusions, references or concrete descriptions concerning the political reflections of the Habsburg installation as well as the administrative changes it produced were interpreted by the writers merely as secondary information, as the direct purpose of the writers is not to analise or follow up the existing policy or the organizational measures. The memoire writers enumerate facts and events selected from their own as well as from the social life.

 

 Keywords: Tisza Government, Transylvania, Lord Lieutenant

 

The article analyses the elite positions of the Lord Lieutenant from Transylvania at the End of the Tisza Government (1890-91). Lord Lieutenants represented a very important branch of the political elite during the Dualist period, given that they were the main agents of government control over the counties. The author focuses on the recruitment base for the Lord Lieutenant corps, the extent to which the aristocracy preserved its dominance within it, the stages of a typical Lord Lieutenant career, the role of the family background, and the extent to which Lord Lieutenants were locals and had links to the county. Despite these changes, the Lord Lieutenant corps exhibits strong continuity until the turn of the century.

 

 

From the 1950s the Hungarian historiography called the uprising of István Bocskai in 1604-1606 a war of independence and presented it as the first Hungarian national independence movement against the Habsburgs followed later one by Ferenc Rákóczi in 1703-11 and by the revolution and the war of independence in 1848-49. According to the new researches the study shows that the Bocskai uprising was a very complex, multifocal and inconsistent movement in the Hungarian theatre of war between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. The movement which started during the summer of 1604 to re-establish the vassal status of the Principality of Transylvania and then in October the Haiduk uprising beyond the Tisza had become in the middle of November a fight for the privileges and the religious freedom of the estates of Upper Hungary. At this time it also became a fight used by the Ottomans to strengthen their own position in Hungary during the Long Turkish War (1591-1606), and Bocskai became their vassal prince already in November 1604. The new researches also demonstrated that the majority of the estates of the Kingdom of Hungary did not join the uprising for any substantial length of time even though Bocskai’s armies achieved considerable victories in 1605, and actively engaged in armed battles against the Haiduk and Ottoman troops. This meant that in the summer of 1605 it was also an internecine war of the Hungarian estates and a full scale civil war in Hungary, and that the majority of the estates of the kingdom did not wish to sever their relationships with the Habsburg Monarchy. The creation of a Hungarian state, independent of both the Habsburgs and the Ottomans was far in the future. The Bocskai uprising, even though anti-Habsburg, cannot be considered a precursor of the Rákóczi independence movement in 1703-11, or of the 1848-49 war of independence.

 

 

Between 1919 and 1945 in Hungary approximately 1200-1300 people can be regarded as members of the military elite according to the disposition and rank criteria. Most members of the elite started their military career in the time of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy. All of them were born before 1918, the majority of them as children ofpetty bourgeois, civil servant families, disposing of moderate means. More than fifty percent of the members of the elite were born in areas disannexed from Hungary after the Trianon peace treaty, mainly in the areas annexed to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Only few were born in the areas annexed to Austria. Most of these people regarded themselves Hungarians, even though many of them had German, Serbian, Croatian, Romanian and Slovakian ancestors, and in some cases members of the elite did not use Hungarian as their mother tongue in their childhood. Just about as many of these soldiers started their career in the joint army of the Monarchy as in the Royal Hungarian Army. The majority of these soldiers also served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic from 1919 on, and this did not ruin their later military career. After the Second World War most of these soldiers had to face screening courts, and the majority of them were not vetted from suspicion. Many of the members of the Hungarian military elite were convicted by Hungarian and Soviet courts – the sentences ranged from the death penalty over imprisonment to penal servitude – and they were only rehabilitated after the Hungarian democratic transformation.