The Notion of Estate in Marczali’s and Hajnal’s Thinking, and the Afterlife of the Concept

Abstract

Henrik Marczali in a study of him published at the outset of the 20th century discussed the changing role of the estate in the course of the overall Hungarian history. In terms of the modern era, he stated that its invariable continuity shapes negatively the process of capitalist development; and this manifests itself in the form that the nobility is gradually becoming a bureaucratic class. István Hajnal several decades later also conceptualized the great role that the estate structural characteristics played in history from Antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. He, however, ascribed a positive role to the mature form of estate even in the developing potential of European modernity. Historians in the aftermath quite frequently discussed the problem of the surviving estate elements, when they found that it is that presumably accounts for the relative backwardness of modernity both in Hungary and Eastern Europe in general. They did it without knowing anything about Marczali’s proposition and often misunderstood Hajnal’s conceptualization. More recently even the Socialist (Communist) sociopolitical system has also been considered as consisting of many estate characteristics. It has not been clarified, however, that this might be outcome of the surviving historical estate patterns or follows only from the fact, that every social system gives some room for the existence of estate patterns as Max Weber held in his influential theorization.