DINNER IN AUSTRALIA: A STARTING POINT

At the dinner following a conference in Australia two years ago, four of us were sitting around a table. All were sociologists: two internationally well-known American professors, both in leading positions and with a crop of several books behind them, and two internationally unknown East Europeans: a woman from Poland and I. We - the Europeans - were glad to realize that both of us had been preoccupied with theater earlier, so we began to talk about the great stage directors of contemporary European theater: Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, Grotowsky, and went on to discuss the traditions of Chekhov interpretations by various national theaters. We spoke English on account of the others, although we would have gladly chatted in French, a language more familiar and intimate to us. At first, the Americans listened well-manneredly, but soon began to fidget and then stare out the window. They couldn't stand it more than ten minutes. The man, the greater authority of the two, asked with unveiled repugnance in his voice: - What sort of sociologists are you? - East European sociologists! -I answered.

And we left it at that. Although we had another half hour or so to spend together (this took place over the hors d'oeuvre), we and the Americans exchanged no more words. Though we half heard them chatting about regression analysis and the modelling problems of multiple variables survey techniques, we immersed into a discussion of various Paris productions of the "Dead Class" by Tadeusz Kantor (the emblematic figure of the Polish stage in the recent past), of the latest films by Andrzej Wajda and Miklós Jancsó (Polish and Hungarian film-makers), and the ambivalent Polish reception of a brilliant novel on a Polish theme, "X-es" by the Hungarian writer György Spiró. We couldn't help studding our conversation with sarcastic remarks levelled at people in the West who mistook Bucharest for Budapest, and only knew those East European intellectuals who could pride themselves on some political laurels such as a certain Milan Kundera, György Konrád or Vaclav Havel.

Of course, channelling our conversation into this course was not only to our own amusement; we also tried to give a lesson to one of the professors because, as we were to agree subsequently, both of us had found his previous-day paper an object-lesson in scientific colonization. He had enlarged upon the hypotheses of his comparative research into the emergence of the new elites of the East European "post-communist" countries, making it clear that apart from preliminarily constructed analytic categories, he had hardly any idea of the historical-cultural context of the studied field, and that by pouncing upon this currently saleable topic, he served his university career and not a better insight into the theme. We felt it an offence against our sense of justice to see an American scholar we judged "uncultured," "uneducated" by our standards, and ill-versed in our region, ready to examine via his local dummies "the amount of cultural capital" possessed by certain social groups without knowing, as we were to realize, whether Béla Bartók was a one-time Romanian party activist close to Ceausescu or a Czech baseball player.

Thus we sniffed at the Americans, comparing ourselves in a way to 19th century aristocrats who looked down upon the middle-class citizens as parvenues. We judged the two professors dull, narrow-minded wooden-heads lacking imagination who could not converse about anything but their strictly professional topics. Compared to them, we regarded ourselves as educated, colorful, interesting, erudite persons in possession of a historically conditioned symbolic set of knowledge deeply embedded in a superior civilization and culture. At the same time, we could not overlook that the professors also showed contempt for us because they found us confused, uninteresting, snobbish; people who, though equipped with a huge amount of redundant knowledge, were unable to adequately apply the right paradigms and scientific concepts, and were professional small fries as we had failed to produce internationally acknowledged scientific results.

INTELLECTUALS VS. PROFESSIONALS

To my mind, an intellectual is a person who defines his/her group identity as the prime possessor and legitimate reproducer of the spiritual-cultural wealth regarded as indispensable for the reproduction of a society at large; he has no direct political or economic power; he assumes the critical attitude of the dedicated spectator (spectateur engage) towards the political and economic elite and tries to render the public social control of the former operative. Professionals and artists are similar to intellectuals in that they do not have direct social or economic power. However, unlike the intellectuals, they exert their symbolic capital the context of their own professional field instead of the whole of society, and they do not participate in public control of political and economic power. They all act with a claim to universality, based, however, on different contextual definition of universality.

This, of course, is not to say that professionals or artists cannot become intellectuals either individually or in such a way that almost the entirety of their fields become the carrier of intellectual identity, and hence their knowledge, their symbolic capital, becomes qualified as universal for the whole society. And vice versa: the intellectual is often, but not necessarily, a professional or artist, at least in certain stages of his trajectory. Or, to put it more cautiously: by being competent in possessing and operating some spiritual capital, an intellectual (not necessarily a graduate of tertiary education) implies the possibility of being an artist or professional. In short: the borders between the three categories are flexible and passable at any time, from any direction.

In Eastern Europe, intellectuals may be seen as a "redundant" social group. The term comes from the Russian category of lishny chelovek and means that history has left them behind in a certain sense (and definitely from the machiavellian viewpoint of the practitioners of power and compared to the contemporary trends of technological-economic modernization). That is why they have become redundant in a sense and also feel redundant subjectively. They are also overrepresented in issuing norms and values which prevail in society, and also have a decisive role in the control of the political elite. To put it in another way: although their role in technological, scientific-intellectual modernization is beneath their social weight, they have a decisive role in the production of symbolic goods.

In East Europe in the 20th century, artists and social scientists drifted into the social position of intellectuals with conspicuous frequency. The absence of functional differentiation between various social spheres and the presence of dictatorial social formations both make it probable that a product originally created by a professional or an artist will exert an influence beyond the relevant professional field in the strict sense of the word. In this region of the world it still seems natural in the second half of the 20th century that an artist or social scientist be the "living conscience, saviour or teacher" of a nation, just as it is no surprise to the natives that after the collapse of communism, several intellectuals crop up among the members of the political elite.

The East European intellectual constructs his spiritual-cultural wealth from symbolic distinctions which can be interpreted historically and have historical relevance, and these make him and the group he represents easy to identify and differentiate in the incessantly reproduced national-cultural context of symbols and signs. In this part of the world, intellectuals conceive of themselves primarily in the dichotomy of eastern vs. western elements (populist-urbanist, zapadnik-pochvennik), regarding their spiritual treasures more valuable than those of their opponents. It is a specific feature of this relationist selfdefinition that it is not made in terms of race, but of cultural and symbolic categories. (Hence, racist anti-Semitism and hostility towards intellectuals does not belong here. It rather characterizes the lower strata and is motivated by the antipathy, heightened at times to hatred, entertained towards anything superior.) A "populist" derives his legitimacy and symbolic superiority mainly from the so-called national tradition, an "urbanist" from a cosmopolitan or European tradition.

In Hungary during the Kádár regime, just as in the "softer" dictatorships of the region (mainly Poland and Czechoslovakia), the intellectual's role of political control became relegated to the background, sulking and individual compromises coming to the fore. At the same time, the need to have symbolic inner separation within the subgroups became imperative. This need or drive was informally mediated, manifested in allusion and concealed leagues, chiefly against the intellectual group postulated as the antagonist. Its strength inhered precisely in its informality: since separation was basically organized upon a secret (i.e. that someone was considered to be Jewish or non-Jewish), communities similar to free masons' lodges began to evolve. The subgroups of this dichotomous field of forces were perfectly convinced of the validity and truth of the secret they fostered. They did not evangelize the secret but only whispered it. It was a taboo to publicly reveal it. In this situation, the probability of interpreting the local political and economic elites, macro-politics (and even the international political sphere) in terms of the hidden symbolism of this inner dichotomy considerably increased.

When therefore a Polish and a Hungarian sociologist meet in Australia, they act in accordance with their deeply conditioned intellectual dispositions. They activate with ease and familiarity the set of symbolic capital which they have acquired at home balancing between the positions of professional and intellectual. And in the meantime they keep teasing the Americans placed in the position of narrow-minded specialists (ignoramus outside their field) classified to be of lower prestige, complexity and appeal, that is, less mysterious or polysemantic, who, in turn, don't understand anything of the whole picture. At the same time, they also position each other in the context of East European intellectuals, as the interpretation of an Andrzej Wajda film, Spiró novel (etc.) allows for the identification of each other.

WESTERN-TYPE MODERNITY VS. EAST-EUROPEAN-TYPE POST-MODERNITY

If it is accepted that modernity is a concept basically related to the experience of time, it is especially well conceivable in this context that in the objectivations and relations belonging to phenomena of the post-modern, the linear continuity of time perception ceases to exist. Theses on the end of history, art, art history or literature (and even the End!) - all sharing the common stance of discarding the continuity from tradition to modernity and replacing it with an ahistoric or post-historical vantage point - are border cases of this paradigm which also suggest that in the overwhelming majority of artistic or scientific endeavours belonging to the post-modern, the represented world steers perfectly clear of any context of development, progress, growth or evolutionary and revolutionary change.

While modernity tries to construct or restructure society and the world in the name of reason, post-modernity aims to destructure, decompose - or to use the magic term: "deconstruct" the illusions and myths related to these very rational institutional and symbolic mechanisms. Post-modern philosophy and semiology are making efforts to destroy the hidden power mechanisms, the dominant western "master-narrative" and "logos" (with no negligible results, too). This critical position strives to make visible the paradoxes of colonizing mechanisms and to question the sense of civilizational superiority felt by the European and American civilization over "primitive," "savage," "natural" societies. Viewed from this position, the relations of sub- and superordination of various cultures become more relativized and balanced, and otherness that seemed irrational in the period of modernity or was deemed inferior is no longer seen as a vestige of the past to be superseded but as an obvious concomitant to a pluralistic, polytheistic existence.

As against the solid, unequivocal and often discriminative patterns of identity determined by the collective factors (consumption, labour market, state, nation) of stratified modern society, the post-modern Ego exists in a centreless and self-less, alien world, "not knowing where it has come from and wither it is going" (Calvino); identity is realized in innumerable forms and manners, assuming ever newer roles. The deconstruction of identity logic opens up the road to constructing individual pluri- and cross-identities, to disintegrating and incessantly restructuring the borders between the socially constructed genders, between legitimate and illegitimate sexual behaviours, between normativity and deviancy, reality and fiction, fact and fancy, native and alien, ego and alterego, between inferior and superior, mass and high culture (etc.).

Modern science's belief in objectivity, the once self-evident dualism of subject and object, is being questioned or qualified as a myth from the position of post-modern social science. Truth becomes defined in relational terms, and one signifier may be attributed several polysemic meanings. The positivistically based quantitativeness of the separate and specialized subdisciplines going out of their way to produce more and more sophisticated measuring techniques is gradually being replaced by interdisciplinary investigating methods not infrequently defining their topics in terms of intuitive relationism, mixing the "thick description" with interpretative devices. Structuralisms, functionalisms, constructivisms, systems theory approaches are giving way to cultural studies, semiotics, cultural anthropology, women and gender studies.

The post-modern condition is first of all the condition of the free-floating intellectual concentrating upon himself. By way of course, this condition assumed different forms in Eastern and Western Europe. After the depletion of the élan of '68 it is certainly disillusioning for western intellectuals to realize that their possibilities seem to be eliminated and their organic goals less and less attainable. The collective intellectual identity is becoming more and more uncertain, undefinable, vague; former intellectuals are being converted into specialists, professionals or artists look at politics as voyeurs désengagés, and not as spectateurs engagés. Aperson, however, who formerly professed to he a member of the intellectual community, can now pick and choose from an almost boundless supply of identities, he/she can discover him/herself, take delight in him/herself, attempt to experience so far unknown dimensions of his/her libidinous drives. He/she can contextually redefine his/her life and speech situations, he/she can experiment, make virtual attempts, become multiplied and fragmented, he/she can reposition, relativize or invalidate him/herself. The functionally differentiated economic, technological and political spheres operating continuously in the paradigm of modernity provide a safe framework for this post-historical narcissistic self-examination.

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the process of modernization in terms of economy, technology and politics, that is, at the macro-level of the social system, seemed utterly hopeless, and right until the end of the ' 80s nothing indicated that a radical change might ever take place. The impasse of modernization, "deadlocked history" (totalitarian establishment, planned economy based on central redistribution, ideologically based "forced modernization" of the technological-scientific sphere) rendered most aspects of social existence under the given circumstances timeless, its essence absurd. The borders of functional differentiation became blurred, incessantly questioned and relativized. The "official version" was always confronted with "unofficial versions" also disseminated by semi-official channels, primary meanings assumed vague, concealed, encoded, figurative connotations, metaphores, symbols. The irrational became the customary experience of everyday life. Trains were westward boud from the East Railway Station of Budapest, and eastward bound from the West Station.

The "redundant class" of East European intellectuals were increasingly responsive to the challenge of grasping this absurd state of existence, for their own sovial embeddedness was also characterized by dual bonds, ambivalence, the motivation to create symbols, the incessant experience of irrationality. This intellectual community existed in a marginal situation: they were both inside and outside, up and down, included in power and excluded from power. Membership in the communist party entailed internal opposition, extra-party opposition entailed self-censorship. The intellectual's professional or artistic activity, in the narrow sense, extended beyond the borderlines of the professional field: it was one of the moast significant goals of a scientist's or artist's activity to convey a hidden message between the lines of the exponents of power and the other group of intellectuals postulated as their inner foes. This message, however, was meant to "warn,""suggest," "make known" in such a way that the sender could not condemned for it forlack of conclusive evidence. The intellectual's aversion to the communist nomenclature did not prevent him from entering into informal relationships with the monopolozers of power, from constituting the recruitment bases of this elite after the stabilization of the system, from engaging in a discourse with the incumbents of power at the main public forums - believing in the possibilitiy to reform the system, not rejecting its basic principles.

Instead of striving to effect the public social control of the spectateur engagé, East European intellectuals, like the gentry of the last century, rested content with the ineffective, impotent strategy of grumbling, pouting, and discontent only felt in informal circles. They rpreferred the individual acts of putting their heads together, winking, understanding each other without words, knowing on wich side their brad was buttered, in place of collective public actions wich they were scared to carry out, and with good reason. The communists at various levels of the nomenclature, in turn, were perfectly aware of this and managed to make the representatives of this pouting class their accomplices via the individual, informal capillary channels. Paradoxically enough, however, the monopolizers of power did have great fear of the informally-symbolically effected influence of the intellectuals, lacking formal power. Any general assembly of the writer's association, a sociological conference tackling the "cumulatevely handicapped" (that is, the poor, who could not be called by name in that ideological-political context) were top priority on the agenda of Political Comittees (not to mention fotball matches). Since intellectuals were more or less clear of the significance of their role, tey did their utmost to mithycize and sacralize it. In other words: while in the `70s-80s the western type of the post-modern condition was associated with the individual experience of increasingly specialized solitary professionals and artists, in system-specific absurd East European variant was attached to the collective experience of a redundant social class.

However, in post-1990 Eastern Europe, the intellectuals all of a sudden found themselves in a sub-historical position: they had lost their character as fellow-travellers, their influence rapidly dwingling. Lobbysts are now huddling together on the sofas of politicians' lounges. The basic political change has triggered the rapid functional differentiation of society, the emergence of the modern market and political structures. Existence has suddenly become teleological, the outlines of the future and the rational goals of the modern world emerging vaguely on the horizon. Whar formerly the intellectuals tried to carry out informally is now becoming the formal business of professionals. What was formulated in enigmas, metaphors, symbols, "between the lines" earlier has become invalidated and meaningless overnight. Polysemic connotations become impossible to decode, (self)myths become school curriculum, the prophet becomes a pub-preacher. Charisma becomes routine, the scared turns prophane, the prophane turns vulgar. The intellectual of yesterday realizes he/she has been thrown into a vacuum, no one listening to him/her. Two alternative border cases are avalaible to him/her in this situation: either he/she remains an intellectual and as a Don Quixote, he/she wages a war against windmlls, that is, resigns from the possibility of power, wealth and specialization, and "as the conscience of the nation," as a dedicated guard, he/she keeps his/her watchful eye on politics. The other alternative is becoming a professional or artist.

Whicever alternative he/she chooses, he/she will of course be unable to shed his/her skin, to drop his/her dispositions of yesterday and the day before (formed in communism and the preceding dictatorships), since even in the best cases he/she can only grow aware of trends of action and shift towards one of the extreme border cases in the knowledge of these. What chance of this shift does a social scientist of a small second-world, East European counry powerfully determined by its linguistic and cultural identity stand? How can this position be contextualized in the field of the globalizing international community of social sciences? I should like to attempt answers to these question in the following.

SECOND WORLD VS. THIRD WORLD

At a conference held in Budapest in June 1991 under the title "Hungary in the world" organized by the Hungarian Sociological Association (and attended by an unprecedented number of international aces of the discipline), a Hungarian sociologist, Anna Wessely gave a lecture titled "The cognitine chance of Central European sociology" (see in this volume). Her paper was published the next year in Hungarian (Replika 1992) and triggered off a debate. Some (e.g. Ferenc Moksony) pointed out that the quantity-oriented American "abstract empiricism" rejected as "imported thinking alien to us" spread to no little extent from Central Europe to the United States" - e.g. via Paul Lazarsfeld. Some others (e.g. Péter Róbert) argued, with reference to Dutch sociology, that the competitiveness of a small country could not be upheld in this discipline unless it had researchers who were able to satisfy the high professional requirements represented by the American Sociological Rewiev or the American Journal of Sociology. Several contributors, agreeing with many statements of the paper that launched the discussion attempted to shade certain historical points and concepts more subtly.

I myself was among those who expressed their doubts and counter-arguments in the debate, doubting first of all the chance that the scientific orientation described in the article might contribute to renewing the teory of sociology and to recapturing the public significance of the discipline in Hungary. My opinion about this chance has not changed, what's more, I no longer find it desirable to "develop" the theory of a discipline (that is, cultivate it in the paradigm of the modern) and to recapture the public role of a branch of science (i.e., to target the lay public). At the same time, Anna Wessely did manage to infatuate me with her thoughts, as I have been preoccupied ever since with the question what sort of cognitive goals a social scientist in an East European post-communist society can set to him/herself; and how big a chance he/she stands to attain these goals.

There are similarities in the social scientific colonization of post-communist countries categorized as the "Second World" and the Third World (allow me to ignore here the conceptual distinction between the third, fourth and n-th worlds). In terms of technology, infrastructure, economy-finances and language, both the second and the third worlds are clearly subordinated to the western world predominated by the United States, even though the degree of this subordination may largely vary. This unequal relationship is also manifest in the fact that both the second (as several references in the writings of the present volume indicate) and the third worlds appear in analyses and publications made in the First World primarily as topics of investigation (or "case studies" by native authors). Nearly without exception the paradigm-creating theories and their theorists all come from the west (which also applies to researchers who were drained from the second or third worlds but admitted into the scholarly community of the west).

A European historian, to quote an oft-mentioned example, can afford to discuss the history of various regions of the world in the context of colonization (i.e. modernization) without ever thinking of taking the South-East Asian, African, Bulgarian or Finnish (etc.) histories as the basis for a universally valid theory. At the same time, when someone is a historian specialized in a Second or Third World region, it is inconceivable that he/she might address his/her research topic without a knowledge of French, German or American (etc.) history. This holds true even if a researcher does not refer to these (or their contextually equivalent) countries in a work, since at any major Second or Third World university the study of western history has at least equal weight to the study of local specificities in the curriculum. That is, the local is only valid in the context of the master narrative.

Another form of scientific colonization implies the almost unnoticed penetration of the outlook and conceptual system of the western paradigm into the study of second- or third-world phenomena - irrespective of whether the researcher of a theme is indigenous or comes from the outside. When the question raised by the social historian or sociologist takes the shape of, say, why a region did not "develop" similarly to the modern western world in a studied period, the answer to be given, whatever it may be, inevitably subordinates the studied subject and the studied region to the master narrative. An example to illustrate this may be the question formulated in the spirit of Max Weber in the following manner: What was missing from Islam (Buddhism, Polish state bureaucracy, etc.) that "prevented", "hindered" the emergence of a western-type capitalism? Whereas the question raised could also be: How were the traditional or archaic structures preserved?

Nothing could better prove the close interrelation between political-economic and scientific colonization than that the best specialists of certain Second and Third World regions can be found in one or the other scholarly workshops of the former colonizing countries: India is most thoroughly known in Great Britain, the realm of the Maghreb in France, Eastern Europe in Germany, South-East Asia in the United States, etc. There is nothing surprising about that. It is worthy of note, however, that while a British researcher picks an Indian topic (or an Australian chooses a theme of the Philippines) by way of course, such a relationship is far less frequent between researchers of the second and the third worlds (or, if there appears such a relationship, the Second-World scholar poses as a quasi-first world researcher), for researchers in this region position themselves first of

all in comparison with the first world. The third world very rarely appears on the horizon of a Second-World scholar (and vice versa), although they could mutually pose extremely interesting comparative questions - not least about their markedly significant relationship with the first world.

Of course, analogies could be continued by more or less systematically comparing the degrees of dependence, the regional and temporal differences, as well as certain spheres, scientific areas, paradigms (etc.) with various degrees of functional differentiation or specialization. In this essay, however, let it suffice to emphasize that no matter where a scholar works in the world, it is desirable at first to attempt to clearly define the main components of his/her professional identity on the basis of his/her libidinous drives and conscious value awareness, and then try to align this with the possibilities based on the institutional-organizational, paradigmatic, thematic and regional determinations of his/ her discipline in the international scientific community. What chance do East European social scientists - and through them - East European social science have to attain these goals? I try to give an answer to this question via a brief detour.

COMPOSERS VS. SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

In Hungary, both experts and lay people name four composers who had special merits in "renewing" national music: Ferenc Erkel (1810-1893), Ferenc Liszt (1811-1886), Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945). In the mid-19th century, Erkel tried to create national music and its institutional system, composing operas on themes of Hungarian history, founding and conducting the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra as its leading conductor, teachning the piano at the Academy of Music. His music, however, does not show many original elements: he imitated faithfully the expressive tools of Italian romantic opera. (The 1994 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music - hereinafter ODM - covers his biography and works in 11 lines.) Liszt was one of the most significant creators and innovators of his age, the age of late romanticism, one of the most outstanding pianists of all times, and a celebrity of European salons and concert halls. He spoke French and German, and broken Hungarian, yet he professed to be Hungarian. He founded and taught at the Academy of Music in Budapest. (As the ODM puts it, "his compositions are now recognized as occupying a high place for their own virtues as well as for their undoubted influence on Wagner, R. Strauss, and subsequent composers...") Synthesizing the classical musical forms with the elements of peasant music, Kodály tried to create a national musical style. As an educator, he made every effort to renew music education, playing a decisive role right up until his death in Hungarian musical and cultural life. (According to the ODM, "Kodály's music is not as advanced in its harmonic idiom as Bartók's and is less cosmopolitan. But it has the merit of complete conviction, finished craftsmanship, and melodic inspiration.") At first in close cooperation with Kodály, Bartók also started with peasant music, wishing to renew 20th century music "in search of the most elementary musical relations." Withdrawing from Hungarian public life, he emigrated to the United States in 1940. (As the ODM notes, "Bartók's music is a highly individual blend of elements transformed from his own admirations: Liszt, Strauss, Debussy, folk-music, and Stravinsky... The melodic fertility and rhythmical vitality of all his music have ensured its consistent success since his death.")

The four composers represent four different models of modernizing national arts on the semi-peripheries. Erkel adhered to models, trying to make the values, techniques, paradigms of the "more advanced" world domesticated and accessible for his indigenous culture, which - in this way - he more or less subordinated to universal civilization. He devoted immense energies to help the nation "catch up" by promoting the forums of the mediating institutional system (music education, concerts). His referential horizon extended beyond his professional-artistic medium: he picked themes for his operas from the national past, and the target group of his activity was the entire "nation." The exemplary conflicts and heroes of the past became tools of political-ideological objectives shaping a national identity and promoting national culture. His work was embedded first of all in the domestic cultural-political context, with negligible significance in determining and shaping the stakes of the international professional field. Consequently, while he is a revered figure of the national pantheon, his name and works are practically unknown for other than Hungarian audiences.

The referential horizon of Kodály's activity partly tallied with Erkel's: he also wished to act as "the educator of the nation", the "teacher of the Hungarians" and, as he grew older, he devoted more and more energy to building up the institutional system - teaching singing in primary schools and the "chorus movement" - which mediated the "national music culture" as he thought it desirable. To this end, he also undertook a political role, similarly to Erkel. In this sense, both of them acted as intellectuals. Yet they cannot be regarded as intellectuals par excellence, since compared to the informal influence of the pure type of East European intellectuals, their positions endowed them with a far greater formal political power. Unlike his predecessor in the last century, Kodály manifestly rejected the civilization continuum: in his view, the "evils" of the modern and cosmopolitan world - such as urbanization, technological development or dodecaphony in music - were polarly opposed to virgin nature, the eternally classical and the deephistorical. He appeared to have found this primaeval, national deep culture, "pure source" in peasant music, and he wished to create his life-work centered around it. Unlike Erkel, who set to music historical situations which were totally alien to musicality in the strict sense, Kodály wished to construct from strictly musical tools of expression the meanings which had validity in a broader social-cultural context as well. As a result, his work appears as a new quality with `differentia specifica' in the field of universal music. Since, however, Kodály awovedly wished to serve "the cause of Hungarians" in the first place, and was truly conservative in consistently rejecting and fiercely criticizing the trends of modern "new music," he was only assigned the position of a local lesser master in the international professional context, cf. the assessment of the ODM. Which, of course, meant a significant "step forward" from the imaginary vantage point of universal musical modernization compared to Erkel's work (which the ODM did not find worthy of evaluation at all).

In nearly every relevant respect, Liszt appears as the opposite of both composers discussed above, being a musician of universal significance positioned first of all in the field of international music. The pure type of cosmopolitan creator could be modelled upon him (as several artistic and scientific attempts to this end have proven). As has been frequently uttered, he is perhaps the first true international superstar in the history of modern music. One may even risk the statement that his professed Hungarianness is also primarily interpretable as part of this cosmopolitanism. What is more: in the age of late

romanticism ascribing exotic flavour to national specificities, it might assign the entire life-work of a composer living in Paris, Weimar, Vienna and Rome the authenticating qualification of "artistically correct": that besides his predominant role as composer, pianist and conductor, and his close relationship with representatives of the European artistic and power elites, he was also tied to a culture considered to be exotic. It is therefore a coincidence in a certain sense - if a fortunate one for Hungary - that Liszt lived in an age and a social milieu which made it easier for a semi-peripheric culture to benefit from his work: partly due to his role Liszt played directly in the music life of Budapest, and partly via his works which wished to represent the specifíties of the Hungarians on par with the rest of the nations in the "European cultural community."

On the basis of the viewpoints relevant to this train of thoughts, Bartók can be positioned somewhere between Liszt and Kodály. He is closer to Liszt in that he positioned himself nearly exclusively in the context of the field of music, in terms of music, in most cases eschewing the option of exceeding the bounds of the musical profession in a narrow sense, and assuming a political role as an intellectual. What positions him closer to Kodály was his ambition to create the universality of music starting from national specificities. He did not wish to elevate the local specificities - like some exotic ornaments - among the musical values conceived as universal, but tried to explore the features that turned the local universal. He did this, to use his definition, as a "scientist" in a dual sense. He regarded the subject of observation - "peasant music" - "a product of nature." While classifying systematically this material, he tried to comply with the most up-to-date comparative criteria of scientific classification. Unlike Kodály, however, who looked for archaic elements in the "pure source" suited to express the national character, Bartók wished to obtain from Hungarian peasant music, via an investigation of the "ancient" elements of Balkanian, Turkish and Arabic music, to a "uniquely concise" music "built from the elementary relations" "free from romantic verbosity and sentimentalism." Experimenting and searching for new musical expression all through his life, he produced an oeuvre which is regarded by every analyst as one of the peak achievements of 20th century modern music.

There is no need to mention that these four types are neither exhaustive nor representative. Just to pick at random some other musical examples, ever newer types could be defined on the basis of, say, Imre Kálmán who studied music with Kodály and Bartók- hence he was technically highly trained, yet(?) he became an operetta composer ("Csárdás Princess") (targetting popularity and the lay public) and world famous as such; or one could mention the group (and subgroups) of (tens of) thousands of Hungarian (East European) musicians employed in various orchestras and institutions of music education all over the world. And one may venture the presumption too that these examples from music also apply to the cognitive chances of the cultivation of the social sciences.

Talking of chances, one has first of all to account for the externalities restricting them. In my view, in the next few decades there will hardly be any possibility to fundamentally change the material, technological-infrastructural dependency of the second world. It is highly likely that the new paradigms will derive from the scholarly workshops of the western world. It also seems most probable that only those Second (and Third) World scientists and disciplines will get into the mainstream of the scientific profession who (and which) can tear themselves from their isolation due to their backwardness, or, in other words, can acquire a perfect command of the technical-methodological-linguistic (etc.) knowledge of a universal nature indispensable for co-ordinated professional communication, and can thus move in the international world of scientific paradigms and institutions with self-confidence.

For the present theme, one of the most important outcomes of the change of the political systems in Eastern Europe around 1990 is that a far greater opportunity of gaining this indispensable universal knowledge is arising. This will increase the chance of generations of scholars coming from the second world by leaps and bounds to become members of the international scientific community, even though most of them are subject to the braindrain. Although the expansion of communicational possibilities facilitates in a sense the Erkelian activity of "promotion-modernisation-imitation" (by making the earlier hardly accessible knowledge more easily obtainable), it definitely reduces, together with the rapid functional differentiation of the social spheres, the life-chances of a Kodály-type discourse of intellectuals of local orientation, thinking in terms of national culture.

Personalities of Liszt's calibre are born one or two a century, so his example is all too extreme and as such, ill-suited for typization. It is not impossible, however, to enumerate East European social scientists who, though possibly not equals of Liszt in genius and school-founding efficiency, who were able to become salient members of the international scientific community in such a way that they also preserved their national affiliations or embeddedness, although their professional achievements can practically be considered to be independent of this embeddedness. Biased as I may seem, let me begin with some Hungarians: besides Ferenczi of the Budapest school of psychoanalysis, classified by many on par with Freud, the ethno-psycholoanalyst Róheim comes to mind. One can mention the sociologist Mannheim or the philosopher Lukács. To remain with philosophers: let us continue the list with Eliade and Cioran of Romania, or the literary scientists Bakhtin and Jakobson of Russia, or again, not to leave out the Poles, Malinowski can also be mentioned, who became world famous as a British social anthropologist. Dozens of names could be added to this list by everybody according to their value considerations and spiritual horizon.

Let us finally return to Bartók. . . Few creators of his stature are born in a century, yet I think, his trajectory offers the most important conclusions for generalization. His lifework exemplifies the feasibility of the chance that a scholar can be capable of creating a theory or paradigm of universal validity starting out from the `differentia specifica' of his very topic, if he gets a profound insight into the subject by systematically studying the local specificities and placing them in a comparative context. In other words: the regional specificities must not remain mere subjects of examination or comparative data for the illustration of some imported paradigm, but they get formulated as a theory making the historical features of the local universal. Let it not be forgotten at the same time, that although fond of solitude, Bartók was not a lonely creator in view of peasant music, since the collection of folk songs, the search for the roots had been "in the air" since romanticism. His singularity thus lies in the original contextualization of this common knowledge.

It is, of course, a question which are those locally embedded particularities which, similarly to peasant music in the focus of Bartók's attention, could become the foundations of East European scientific ventures with the dimensions of Bartók's endeavour. In my view, various possibilities are implied by different social scientific disciplines. Let me only pick one structural specificity which in future synthesizing works might take the role of "peasant music". Introducing the category of "the absurd East European post-modern" or using

the borrowed terms of "forced modernization" and "deadlocked history", I joined automatically the conceptual-interpretative tradition wide-spread in Hungarian social sciences which tries to grasp dichotomies, the co-existence of seemingly irresolvable conflicts. Notably, the present and past of Hungarian society seem to provide ample information for the experience and conceptualization of paradoxical conditions of existence. It should be realized that in the 20th century, Hungarian social science has created dozens of metaphorical, hence enlightening concepts which may be operationalized. Just to mention a few: "dual society", "dichotomous structure", "second economy", "second society", "lopsided country", "delayed embourgeoisement", "forced modernization", "forced orbit of modernization", "simulated capitalism", "headless revolutionary", "false realist". And when in the present volume one reads about the sensitivity of Hungarian economic sociology to "historical asynchronousness" (György Lengyel) or about the "split sociological mind" (Tibor Kuczi), one practically encounters the conceptualization of the same absurd forms of being owing to their historical co-existence. Picking at random, one can add to this list at least two categories which laid the foundations for the world fame of their creators: the "basic fault" (meaning "prime break") in the centre of the psychoanalyst Mihály Bálint's work, and the "free-floating intellectual" (Socialfreischwebende Intelligenz) by Karl Mannheim. But, to quote a more topical example: today's Hungarian economics also has a scholar of Bartókian magnitude and depth: Jánost Kornai, who was able to create the universally valid theory of the socialist-type economic systems on the basis of the concepts of the "economy of shortage" and "soft budget constraint", which fit with shocking precision into the above conceptual trend.

The collapse of communism and the circumstances of globalization around the turn of the millenium are enhancing the chances of a Bartókian cognitive synthesis. The expanded world, the increased speed of communication may considerably enrich quantitatively, too, the basis from which the Bartóks of the future may be recruited. And the social scientists of Eastern Europe accustomed to the absurd form of intellectual existence may move about more easily in the world of post-modern science with pluralistic values, transgressed disciplinary borders, and a personalness and metaphoricalness as part of the relationally defined objectivity. It also enhances the chances of this synthesis that in this global world society, similarly to world music, the incommensurable but reconcilable local specificities can continuously be redefined and repositioned as a result of newer and newer mutual identity-negotiations. This, of course, requires the representation of recognized and negotiated identities, and, if need be, a discourse aiming at independence and emancipation. It must also be achieved that the attention imlied by political correctness should be extended to distinctive marks decisive for our self-identity, for example to our embeddedness the in Second World, in addition to sharper and more spectacular inequalities and injustices than ours. If someone wants something, he has to speak up.