One hundred years of solitude

Perspectives of labour studies in Hungary in the 20th century

Abstract

From time to time, labour studies have appeared in social science discourses as the “stepchildren” of social sciences, as if they always aimed at understanding industrial labour from a partisan standpoint. To what extent was Hungarian labour research peripheral? One of my assumptions is that, on the contrary, Hungarian labour studies have always been progressive and internationally interpretable, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they have often been read as political reflections. Almost all labour studies, despite the researchers’ intentions, could be used for political purposes, and therefore they were often given special attention. In this paper, I will review the perspectives that have been used in the broader resonance of nearly a century of labour studies, from the factory inspector’s reports at the turn of the 19th and 20th century to the 1970s. I aim to answer the question of what socio-political motivations may have influenced the narrative techniques used by Hungarian workers’ researchers and how this related to international social science trends. The second question is more complex: why did it happen that labour studies were always politicised, and why did this, rather than their novel methodology, distinguish them from social research?