A szociálpolitika válaszútjai Magyarországon: a mintakövetés lehetőségei és kényszerei (1938-1950)

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Abstract in foreign language

Social policy as related to political as well as social history embraces a large field of study, and yields many opportunities for an interdisciplinary research. My aim is to show how such a multifaceted approach can be applied to Hungarian social policy in the period from 1938 to 1950 by crafting a frame for a potentially novel interpretative scheme which includes the investigation of British, German, and Soviet social policy transfers as well. Besides sociological and economic studies, earlier, especially traditional historical narratives tended to represent this period of Hungarian social history as a quite linear “flow” with certain easily identifiable but stark breaking points, such as the year 1945, or the communist takeover in 1948-49. So that these static interpretations and the eventual quasi-deterministic historical reconstructions could be avoided, the proposed research analyses one of the most important, and so far neglected historical aspects of social policy: the relationship of welfare alternatives and actual social practice. On the basis of previous research in several archives of Budapest I have interpreted the social policy of the period as a changing dimension of continuities and discontinuities. I have arrived at the conclusion that it could not be understood with a stark separation at the end of World War II because it would shallow important relations between the Horthy Era and post-war Hungary while keeping its strong ideologically-biased distinctions. On the contrary, the establishment of the welfare state, which is usually attributed to its post-war development all over Europe, was devised way before 1945, having its roots in late 1930s social policy.

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