Abstract

This is essentially a study in the philosophy of culture, which tries to define the specific East-Central European modes of thinking as dimensions of a "peripheral" identity. The first chapter argues that an "anthropological conservatism" underlies much of the intellectual evolution of the Danubian area in the last two hundred years or so. Nyíri traces five successive waves of conservatism beginning with the circle of St. Clemens Maria Hofbauer and Friedrich Schlegel soon after 1800 and going all the way to Friedrich Hayek and Robert Musil between the two world wars. Common to these successive waves of conservative theorizing was their moderation, or the attempt to combine liberal and conservative values. They often took their cue from English, rather than from the more radical or utopian French and German models. They also used a nonpolitical language and Nyíri sketches out tantalizingly the conservative implications of Musil's novels and Freud's psychoanalytical essays. Marginality is seen as the belated or muted response of all these thinkers to initiatives coming from a more remote "center." One of the most valuable passages for the Western reader should be the one describing the thought of Jozsef Eötvös, a kind of Hungarian Tocqueville.