Andras Hegedus Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Andras Hegedus (1922–1999) was a Hungarian politician who served as his country’s youngest prime minister from 1955 to 1956. He signed the treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact as well as the document requesting the help of Soviet troops to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He later criticized and opposed Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and was expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party in 1973. Hegedus was a Social Democrat and a member of the Budapest school, which developed a variant of Marxism known as critical Marxism that opposed Stalinist deformative politics.

Born in Sopronfelsoszentmiklos into a peasant family, Hegedus became an active member of the Communist Party during World War II (1939–1945). At the end of the war, when the Communists seized power, he became a member of the party’s Central Committee and secretariat and quickly rose to become first deputy prime minister and agriculture minister under Prime Minister Imre Nagy. In 1955, Hegedus was appointed prime minister but the next year, he was forced to leave the office and exiled to the Soviet Union. He returned to Hungary in 1958 as a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics. In 1962, he became deputy president of the Central Statistical Office, and in 1963, head of the Sociology Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and editor in chief of the journal Valosag (Reality). In 1966, he began to teach at the Karl Marx University of Economics. Two years later, following his condemnation of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, he was dismissed. Thereafter Hegedus became one of Hungary’s best-known dissidents and denounced Soviet atrocities until the fall of communism in the late 1980s.

Hegedus worked to develop an alternative socialist model involving a pluralist society in which the bureaucracy was tempered by popular control. This would require a profound process of self-reform, including the reform of the electoral system. Hegedus’s society depended on the growth of nonbureaucratic structures and autonomous networks with the means to oppose state bureaucracies. According to Hegedus, economic reforms are not enough and should be accompanied by ideological revision, since when ideologies become rigid, there is always the danger of repression and suppression of ideas. However, progress will be incremental. Bureaucracies do not give up power easily, but they can be persuaded to slowly relinquish small parts of power in order to gain greater legitimacy in the eyes of those they rule.

Hegedus’s works include Socialism and Bureaucracy (1986) and The Humanization of Socialism (1976).

Bibliography:

Brown, Donald. Towards a Radical Democracy: The Political Economy of the Budapest School. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Sebestyen, Victor. Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. New York: Pantheon, 2006.

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