REVOLUTION RECONSIDERED: INSTITUTION-BUILDING IN A MORAL VOID
REVOLUTION RECONSIDERED: INSTITUTION-BUILDING IN A MORAL VOID

Summary/Abstract: The series of events that began in early 1989 and culminated in the free elections in March 1990 have been characterized as "revolution" of one of four kinds. According to the British journalist T. G. Ash, it was a "refolution" suggesting that what happened in Hungary was more than reform but less than a revolution. Though intended as a clever oxymoron, the term is grossly misleading as it obscures and trivializes the qualitative difference between the point of departure and the point of arrival, that is, the difference between dictatorship and democracy According to the former democratic oppositionist ideologue János Kis and several others who chose this formulation, the Hungarian events amounted to a "lawful revolution." The term stresses the notion of legal continuity and the nonviolent and non-confrontational nature of events. In my view, it is a misnomer as it deliberately overlooks the essentially politics- and power-driven substance of the process and, by design, fails to make any kind of moral distinction between the "before" and "after" spirit and normative content of laws and institutions.

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