Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions

This volume is devoted to the central themes in Iván Szelényi?s sociological oeuvre comprising of empirical explorations and their theoretical refinement in the last 50 years. The contributors have been asked to take interpretive and critical stances on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his insights. Iván Szelényi has been asked to write a concluding chapter, and respond to the present reflections on his work. The ensuing volume discusses Szelényi?s captivating scholarship as being grounded in a complex program for the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms, and introduces him as a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to investigate inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in various societies.



Contributors include: Dorothee Bohle, Tamás Demeter, Gil Eyal, Béla Greskovits, Michael D. Kennedy, Tamás Kolosi, Karmo Kroos, Victor Nee, David Ost, Iván Szelényi, and Bruce Western.

?I warmly recommend this volume to the reader. Those interested in Hungarian social science, in the basic features of capitalist and socialist societies and the transitions between them, will find an important source in this collection of papers. Beyond the relevant issues discussed by the contributors, the reader can catch a glimpse of the history of Hungarian social science. The papers reveal Iván Szelényi?s intellectual predecessors and his influence on his contemporaries, disciples and the younger generations of sociologists. Reading Szelényi and reading about Szelényi is always a source of intellectual enjoyment. I have been reading his works for several decades now, and I do not cease to learn and derive inspiration from them ? when I agree with him, and even when we disagree here and there. It is due to his sharp formulations and engaging style that he has become a leading authority of Hungarian sociology and political science in particular and social science in general. I do hope this volume will find a wide readership, and that it will serve as course material recommended to sociology students.?



?János Kornai, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Harvard University

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