Alexander Szalai: A Transsystemic Career and Hungarian Sociology in the Cold War Era

Abstract

Through a detailed analysis of Alexander Szalai’s career as a major transsystemic academic entrepreneur in the Kádár era, this paper has been written to discern and assess how such activities impacted the ways in which science and scholarship worked at both sides of the systemic divide (the “Iron Curtain”). The single most important finding is the emergence of transsystemic spaces (fields), the undoing of national and systemic boundaries. These transsystemic configurations tended to provide social (formal and informal) frameworks within which reputations are generated and distributed, reputational hierarchies are established and reproduced. For scholars in the East such transsystemic spaces brought with them a great deal of good news: they could mean increased freedom and/or an unbiased assessment and genuine acknowledgement for what one has accomplished. Transsystemic fields brought with them a whole array of new (kinds of) opportunities. Acting as a nod of networks that generated transsystemic spaces could yield increased reputation and power at home. As all structures in the social world, however, transsystemic spaces could enable as well as constrain, they could propel you to the skies and might also crush you. As any other resources constituting social capital in academia, the space spanning along transsystemic networks of scholars and scientists could also be weaponized for the wrong purposes: they could enable impostors to acquire a status and reputation way over and above the person’s actual accomplishments, due to imperfect information available in foreign environments. Time would, of course, always show who they really are – but before that happens, they could bring havoc upon their field back home by distorted reputational hierarchies, by skewed distribution of competitive power between rivaling intellectual tendencies or “schools” and, eventually, by “paradigmatic” streamlining and contra-selection. This is, in a nutshell, what the story of A. Szalai shows.