A young woman born in the November of 1956 tells the story of her tragic life. With her father executed after the '56 revolution, this ill-fated daughter of the revolution was raised in an orphanage. Leaving it at the age of 18, her life has proved to be a failure: her personal relationships with friends, lovers, and her own daughter are as unsuccessful as her quest for job, and stability in her life. Her search after her father reveals how the state authorities (both before and after 1989) treated the offsprings of those executed in 1956.
 

The introductory paper of the thematic section, written by Zsolt Szíjártó, overviews how social thought has changed along with the emerging risks of technological development and how the vocabularies of uncertainty, danger, and risk have permeated social discourses. He presents a review of the literature on risk research, and after identifying the main paradigms, he briefly discusses the results of Hungarian research initiatives. In the following article, Wolfgang Bonß seeks to identify the main issues of the social science discourse on risk. By using anthropological examples, he examines the history of the key concept, and shows how various authors have discussed the manifestations and meanings of uncertainty in different contexts. The next essay, written by Mary Douglas, has the air of an intellectual autobiography. She seeks to compare the various ways in which different communities have tried to cope with danger, and the various strategies they have used in estabilishing responsibility in cases of accidents and unfortunate events. In the last article, Ulrich Beck describes the road along which industrial societies transform into risk societies: he defines and interprets the distinction between the two social forms, reflects on the opinion of his critics, and provides a brief sketch of the new society.
 

One of the swiftest developments during the transition from state-socialism was the reconfiguration of the intellectual field in the social sciences. Mainstream (neoclassical) economics, for example, has occupied not only academic, but also important political positions in the East and Central European countries. However, if reports on the crisis of the economic sciences in the Western world are correct, and economics is indeed undergoing a process of fragmentation and reorientation, then we should more vigorously scrutinize its most fundamental building blocks and seek to develop alternative research approaches. In our region, which had experienced the ideological omnipotence of Marxist dialectical materialism, it is especially crucial to challenge the domination of any single school of economic thought.

The first drafts of the papers in this thematic section were discussed in the Center for Pluralistic Economic Studies, established at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences in 1997. The first essay, “Adam Smith's Wealth of the Nations and the Philosophy of the Enlightenment," written by László Fekete, shows how classical political economy separated from moral philosophy and became an independent but not value-free social science. In the next article, entitled “Ethics and Economics," György Pataki investigates some of the ethical aspects of modern welfare economics. In his paper, “Economy and Morality," Péter Gedeon analyzes Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis on the end of history and his ideas on the role some traditional and moral values play in modern economy. The last essay in the section is entitled “The Experience of Beyond-Existence." In this philosophical piece, Sándor Horváth seeks to accomodate the basic principles of existentialism, ethics, and economics.
 

Four Slovenian sociologists discuss the connections of religion, politics, philosophy, and the modern state, mostly in a post-socialist, East and Central European context. While exploring the relationship between religion and the secularized modern state, AlešDebeljak clarifies the boundaries between conservatism, traditionalism, and fundamentalism. Remaining on an abstract level, he seeks to identify the basic characteristics of fundamentalism as a religious-political activity. Mitja Velikonja draws attention to the role of the different religions and churches in the (re)creation of the different national myths in the post-socialist East and Central European states. Marjan Smrke approaches Slovenia's religious past and present from a sociological perspective, and highlights distinct shifts in the religious sensibility of the people after the separation from the former Yugoslavia, with special attention to the strenghtening superstitiousness. Finally, Lev Kreft contemplates on the legacy of the Enlightenment: the guilty conscience of twentieth-century European intellectuals, and the spread of extremism that has found its rational foundation in the enlightened criticism of the Enlightenment.
 

We continue our series on the history of communication by presenting the works of Hungarian authors who may be regarded as the forerunners of communications theory marked by the names of Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Eric Havelock. These American theoreticians argue that communication through electronic technology returns to some of the communication habits of societies based on orality. József Balogh's 1921 study Voces paginarum focuses on the historical impact of the spread of silent reading between the sixth and seventeenth centuries, which produced an utterly new culture of communication. Balogh's classic work inspired scholars such as Paul Seanger, T.C. Skeat and Pierre Riché, and may help us to reconsider the relationship between the printed, dead text and the spoken, living word from the perspective of the Internet.