István Kemény (sociologist)

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István Kemény

István Kemény (born August 14, 1925 in Kaposvár ; † April 14, 2008 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian sociologist who researched poverty and the Hungarian gypsies .

Life

Kemény's parents moved from Kaposvár to Budapest in 1929 , the father was a railway engineer, the mother, a Croatian, had trained as a teacher, but she had to take care of the upbringing of the five sons. As early as 1941, during the Hungarian-German invasion of Yugoslavia , political resistance arose from high school student Kemény. After the German occupation of Hungary , he was arrested for the first time on December 19, 1944.

Kemény had started to study medicine at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest in September 1943, but in the turmoil before the end of the war and after the war, an orderly study was hardly possible. He switched to sociology and designed a political program for Hungarian smallholders in the post-war period. He married in 1948 and left college in 1951 to work as a teacher.

After the crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution , he was sentenced to four years in prison in May 1957 and released early in 1959. He then worked as a state-employed translator and worked in the Széchényi National Library until 1969 , maintaining a list of foreign books he had bought. In a phase of liberalization of the Hungarian economy, a sociological study on social stratification was initiated in 1963 under the direction of György Péter, on which he worked. At the Statistics Office he evaluated a study “Who reads and what?”, Took part in an income study and wrote in 1963 about class mobility , with the result that this turned out to be higher in the capitalist countries than in communist Hungary. Another study should focus on poverty in Hungarian society. Studies with the title “poverty” were banned, however, so that the sociologists examined the “lower income brackets” instead.

Since there was a labor shortage in Hungary in the 1960s , the political leadership tried to eliminate the segregation of the Gypsies through integration . This is also because the poverty of the gypsies was too obvious. In 1970, Kemény was therefore commissioned to conduct a study that was carried out in 1971. This study was repeated in 1993 and 2003 after the political change.

After István Kemény had given a famous lecture on the poverty of the proletariat at the academy in 1970, he had to leave the institute. After that he was only able to hold illegally held private colloquiums, but they soon no longer satisfied him. He finally left Hungary in 1977.

With the help of Raymond Aron , after another year of unemployment, he did a research stay in France from 1978 to 1981 at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and from 1983 to 1990 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales . In 1983 he published the collected works of István Bibó . Between 1980 and 1990 he also worked for Radio Free Europe .

After the reunification he returned to Hungary and became director of the Sociological Institute in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . In Budapest he also worked for the newly elected Budapest Mayor Gábor Demszky .

In 1994 he received the Imre Nagy Medal, in 2003 he received the Ferenc Deák Prize and the Széchenyi Prize .

Between 1968 and 1980 he worked on the Hungarian translation of Arnold Hauser's “Social History of Art”. For his part, Hauser returned to Hungary in 1977.

Works

Kemény's writings have appeared in Hungarian and English. Little is it translated into German.

  • Roma of Hungary , Boulder, Colo .: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2005.
  • Linguistic Groups and Usage Among the Hungarian Gypsies , in: Ernö Kállai (Ed.), The Gypsies / The Roma in Hungarian Society , Budapest 2002, pp. 28-34. 1971 investigation
  • with Béla Janky, A cigány nemzetiségi adatokról [On the data of the gypsies], in: Kisebbségkutatás [minority research], (2003) 2, o. p.
  • (Ed.), Romák, cigányok és a láthatatlan gazdaság [Roma, Gypsies and the Invisible Economy], Budapest 2000.
  • Antisemitism universitaire et concurrence de classe
  • Victor Karády, István Kemény, Les juifs dans la structure des classes en Hongrie: Essai
  • István Bibó: Bibó István összegyûjtött mûvei. I-IV. Sajtó alá rendezte Kemény István és Sárközi Mátyás . [Collected Works of István Bibó. I-IV. Arranged for the press by István Kemény and Mátyás Sárközi.] European Protestant Hungarian Free University, Bern. 1981-1984
  • Eörsi I. (1988): Emlékezés a régi szép idõkre. [Remembering the Good Old Days.] Budapest: Katalizátor Iroda. [samizdat; first edition; legal second edition, Napra-forgó Kft., 1989, Budapest.]
  • Ferge Zs. (1969): Társadalmi mobilitás, a társadalom nyitottsága . [Social Mobility, the Openness of the Society.] Valóság, 6: 10-19.
  • Parasztságunk útja. [The Way of Our Peasantry.] In Kemény I .: Szociológiai írások. [Sociological Writings.] Budapest: Replika Könyvek, 7–21. ([1946] 1992)
  • A szegénységrõl. [On Poverty.] In Kemény I .: Szociológiai írások. [Sociological Writings.] Budapest: Replika Könyvek, 79-83.1972 / 1992
  • Technika, szakmastruktúra és munkahelystruktúra. [Technology, Occupational Structure and the Structure of Workplace.] In: Kemény I .: Szociológiai írások. [Sociological Writings.] Budapest: Replika Könyvek, 175-200. 1976/1992
  • A magyarországi cigány lakosság . [The Gypsy Population of Hungary.] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. 1976
  • with Á. Horváth: Ki olvas with? [Who reads What?] Valóság. 1965
  • with Á. Horváth: With olvasunk? [What are we reading? ] Budapest: KSH. 1965
  • Ladányi J. and Szelényi I. (1997): Ki a cigány? [Who is a Gypsy?] Kritika, 12.
  • Mód A., Ferge S., Láng Gy. and Kemény I. (1966): Társadalmi rétegzõdés Magyarországon. [Social Stratification in Hungary.] Budapest: Statisztikai Idõszaki Közlemények, KSH.

literature

  • György Majtényi The power of interpretation and the interpretation of power. On the terminology of Hungarian social history after 1945 In: Korall 5 / 19-20 (2005), German at kakanien (PDF; 1.0 MB)
  • Melani Barlai; Florian Hartleb: The Roma in Hungary , in: From Politics and Contemporary History , (2009) B 29-30, pp. 33–39.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anikó Eszter Bartha, Alienating Labor: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary , etd.ceu.hu (PDF; 2.0 MB) p. 23
personal data
SURNAME Kemény, István
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaposvár
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 2008
Place of death Budapest