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Adam Slez, Review of “The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 3, March 2022, Page e10, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab100
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In The Retreat of Liberal Democracy, Gábor Scheiring sets out to explain the retrenchment of democratic institutions in his home country of Hungary following the election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2010. This is a deeply personal story for Scheiring, who watched his parents struggle with the hardship and disillusionment that accompanied the transition from socialism to capitalism. While Scheiring served in the Hungarian parliament from 2010 to 2014 as part of the country’s burgeoning green movement, his father—a blue-collar worker—turned to the right. This book is, in many respects, an attempt to make sense of this experience—to make sense of how members of the working class came to see Orbánism as a palliative for the experience of class dislocation in the post-socialist era. But workers were not the only ones hurt by the transition to capitalism. As Scheiring describes, the push for market liberalization was part and parcel of an effort on the part of left-wing technocrats to institutionalize the extensive accumulation of transnational capital, which worked to the determinant of the national bourgeoisie. From this perspective, Orbán’s rise to power and the illiberal turn that followed can be understood as the product of a dual countermovement on the part of the working class and the national bourgeoisie, both of whom appeared to be losing ground in the post-socialist era.
