Abstract
It is now eight years since Thesis Eleven published a Festschrift for Maria Márkus. Since then things have changed. Maria died over a year ago in September 2017. The world has been over-turned too. Rightist politics have gripped Eastern Europe, Donald Trump is in the White House, xenophobic populist movements have been energised across the globe and the future of the European Union is up for grabs. It’s time for reflection, for the weighing of losses and for a renewed ‘saving’ interest in Maria’s key themes and preoccupations about building civility in our institutions and decency in our relationships. It’s time also for contemplation about the loss of Maria from our lives. We have invited some explicit reflections on the unique, the unforgettable, Maria and encouraged contributors who also knew her to talk about her significance for them. Personally, we still find it hard to take in the fact that she is gone from our lives. Perhaps more than anyone else that we have known, Maria embodied life itself. She was a living presence that is but poorly captured in the apt descriptions of: vitality, intelligence, devotion, courage, integrity, love of fun, truthfulness, ethical self-restraint and more. We are very grateful that Maria’s youngest son Andras Márkus has allowed us to publish his moving and thoughtful Eulogy.
Andras has spoken of the four distinct stages in her life demarcated by both geography and language: her childhood in Poland during the Second World War, university education in Moscow during the mid-1950s and Stalin, followed by about 20 years in Budapest as a sociologist, and finally moving to Sydney from 1978 for the rest of her life after political dissidence forced her family into emigration. In our special number for Thesis Eleven we have concentrated on the last two stages that established her intellectual reputation and especially the last period in Sydney that we know best.
We begin with the papers by Iván Szelényi and Ágnes Heller, recalling the critical role of the Research Group on Sociology in the Academy of Sciences in 1963. They underline Maria’s decisive contribution to the short-lived renaissance of Hungarian critical sociology during the middle of the 1960s; its international resonance within the other Eastern European countries and even as far as Italy and the US. Maria was the key intellectual force assisting András Hedegüs and connecting him to the critical Marxism of the Lukács-inspired Budapest School. Both her intellectual powers and great social skills were central to the vitality of this group and its achievements in industrial sociology. Heller especially records her thanks and reflects upon Maria’s personal courage in assisting her to return to intellectual life in Budapest after she was blacklisted in the wake of Lukács’ role in 1956. Continuing with the theme of friendship, we turn to Mira Crouch’s meditation on her special bonds with Maria as they both found new homes in Sydney. Maria’s personality and life were deeply grounded in the everyday and Mira’s piece reminds us of her dogged heroism, her great gift for hospitality and her sparkling wit.
We now engage with the fourth and longest phase of Maria’s life in Sydney. Here we wanted to display something of the range of her intellectual interests and the multiple focuses of her work while at the same time trying to capture the essence of the very well-rounded personality and very lovable woman. We begin with two papers initially written at the time of her retirement by two of her closest friends and admirers. In an occasional address delivered at a retirement event to the Sociology Department where Maria was employed for most of her working life, John Grumley focuses on ‘needs’ and ‘decency’ as key concepts in her analysis of contemporary social life against the background of the personal meaning of a ‘successful’ life for her. Martin Krygier takes her concept of ‘decency’ as the highest level attained by civil society and challenges the priority she accords to the former over the ‘coldness’ of civil society.
The ‘politisation of needs’, as a change to the very meaning of politics, has been a signature theme in Maria’s work. It crosses the various episodes in her writings and is a unifying thread amongst its wide range of topics. She is interested in how a social democratic society can realise its best potentials as it supports the processes through which people come to grasp the society-wide significance of their self-interpreted needs and bring about the cultural and institutional changes that are required for their satisfaction. All the essays in this volume have registered this radically democratic orientation in Maria’s contribution to critical theory. Harry Blatterer draws attention to Maria’s abiding and original interest in the reciprocity and the ‘world openness’ of friendship as a relationship type. In this sense it might be said that all friendships are ‘political’.
Pauline Johnson’s ‘Learning from the Budapest School Women’ first appeared in Critical Theories and the Budapest School: Politics, Culture and Modernity, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell (Routledge, 2018). Pauline introduces the significance of Maria’s theorisation of the politics of needs in a bid to rework a social democratic feminism that might wrest its project from neoliberal distortions. Norbert Ebert’s ‘Mess Is More: Radical Democracy and Self-Realisation in Late-Modern Societies’, reflects in a general way on the significance of Maria’s abiding interest in the politicisation of needs and the inevitable ‘messiness’ of the modern social democratic condition: to underline the key conceptual tasks that confront critical theory in a world that is caught between pluralistic and rigid, homogenising political cultures.