19 May 2023
IISL visiting scholar István H. Szilágyi will give an open talk titled "What is Wrong with Us, Hungarians?" (23 May, 14:30). Registration is open to anyone interested.
István H. Szilágyi began his academic carrier (Phd 1998, Dr. habil. 2009) in 1989, the year of democratic change in Hungary. He has been teaching at the Faculty of Law, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest since its foundation, 1995. He has diverse scholarly interest united by his devotion to the interdisciplinary approach in legal studies. He conducted legal anthropological research among the Hungarian Roma minority in the 1990’s and studied the history of the Hungarian legal thinking with special regard to Barna Horváth’s and István Bibó’s works. After the millennium, his attention turned to the field of ‘law and literature’. He was a founding member and the first president of the Hungarian Society for Law and Literature. He has returned to the empirical socio-legal studies in 2012 entering in a research group studying the Hungarian legal consciousness.
"The aim of my presentation is to show how Hungarian legal consciousness and legal culture are related to democratic participation. First, I will discuss how the question of "something wrong" with the Hungarian character arose in Hungarian political thinking, based on István Bibó's historical analysis. In the following, I will take stock of how the internal problems of the Hungarian political community have manifested themselves in terms of attitudes towards politics and civic activity after the regime change. Following an analysis of the Hungarian legal consciousness, I will look at why the Hungarian population does not support the Rule of Law and how this problem can be remedied."
To register, please fill in this form.
