The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class
Greed and Creed
Seiten
2023
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic (Verlag)
978-1-6669-2396-4 (ISBN)
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic (Verlag)
978-1-6669-2396-4 (ISBN)
An archivally based exploration of the everyday life in Hungary’s communist apparatus class after 1956, this book covers consumption, mobility, and leisure. Péteri shows how class power and privilege as well as Western patterns asserted themselves in the everyday of state-socialist society.
The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the state’s decisive role in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in every day. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.
The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the state’s decisive role in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in every day. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.
György Péteri is professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.
Foreword
Prologue
Chapter 1: Consumerism and Demand Side Abundance
Chapter 2: New Sobriety: Comrade Kucsera and His Legacy
Chapter 3: The Acquisitive Functionary
Chapter 4: Hunting
Chapter 5: Holidays and Class Struggle under State Socialism
Chapter 6: Forgetting the Simple Art of Walking: The Social Order of Apparatus Mobility
Conclusion
| Erscheinungsdatum | 04.11.2023 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 159 x 237 mm |
| Gewicht | 499 g |
| Themenwelt | Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-6669-2396-6 / 1666923966 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-6669-2396-4 / 9781666923964 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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