György Mihály Vajda

Who is György Mihály Vajda?

Mihály András Vajda is a Hungarian leftist intellectual who took part in the debates surrounding the development of national socialism, Marxism–Leninism, and the state of capitalism in the latter half of the 20th century. Involved in politics in his home country of Hungary, Vajda was expelled along with several other scholars from the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in 1973 due to allegedly representing views that were "opposed to Marxism–Leninism and to the policy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party." Vajda was one of the original members of Georg Lukács's "Budapest School", Hungarian theorists who began as neo-Marxists but moved on to what they called post-Marxist and also post-modern perspectives. Writing primarily in Hungarian, but with many works translated into English, Vajda's works treat such themes as the past and future of state socialism in Europe and fascism as a mass phenomenon. Vajda continues to draw, like other members of the original Budapest School, from a Marxist legacy in seeking to examine the state of contemporary liberal society. Recently, he has been involved in a controversy concerning critical remarks made respecting the Hungarian government, and specifically government policies that challenged free media. In a notable show of support for Vajda and his colleague fellow Hungarian theorist Ágnes Heller, Jürgen Habermas and Julian Nida-Rümelin wrote a public appeal in defense of Vajda and Heller, insisting that "We are concerned about the political and professional fate of our Hungarian colleagues... Under the nationalist government, which has used its two-thirds majority to erode the Hungarian constitution, they are again exposed to political persecution."