„Csak saját erőmre és teljesítményemre utalva” (A „self-made man”-ek világa)
“Relying on my own strength and performance only”. The world of self-made men

Summary/Abstract: The essay is a case study of how the members of two bricklayer families rooted in the guild system carved out places fro themselves in capitalist society and rose to various levels of the middle classes in the second half of the nineteenth century. The discussion is focussing on the career of Lipót Havel, building contractor, whose exceptionally rapid and successful rise shows that successfully adjusting to new challenges took much more than the institutional channels of mobility. The description of the careers of his numerous collaterals illustrates the individual and family strategies of rising from feudal burgesses to the new bourgeois middle classes. Besides professional careers, the issues of developing a middle class way of life, education, travelling customs, and everyday life are also discussed in the essay. Although it would be far fetched to draw conclusions of general validity on the basis of the history of one family only, be it ever so extensive, the careers of the family members would seem to support the thesis that performance and talent played a much greater role in the case of this group of the middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century than in later decades, when institutional channels of mobility held out brighter prospects. Therefore, a scrutiny of individual careers might refine the conclusions drawn from macro-level examinations of social mobility, and move towards a revision of a number of deep-rooted clichés — such as the assumption concerning the inability of old guild craftsmen to adjust.

• Details
• Contents