ISBN:
9781666923964
Language:
English
Pages:
xviii, 215 Seiten
,
Illustrationen
Series Statement:
The Harvard Cold War studies book series
DDC:
305.5/209439
Keywords:
Elite (Social science) History
;
Social classes History
;
Communism and society
;
Hungary Social conditions 1945-1989
;
Hungary Politics and government 1945-1989
;
Ungarn
;
Funktionär
;
Alltag
;
Privileg
;
Geschichte 1945-1989
Abstract:
This book discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.
Note:
Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 201-208
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