From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis

Introduction

Introduction János Kis is exceptional in many ways. He is a subtle, imaginative and highly original political thinker; a person of great personal courage and integrity who has suffered because his ideas were thought dangerous; and a philosopher who has been himself a political leader and political force—perhaps the only distinguished philosopher in our times who has been. His intellectual history and project are of great importance not only for Eastern Europe, where his ideas were formed, but for liberal egalitarianism as a viable model for government . Kis began his academic career in 1967, as a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a Marxist in the Lukacs tradition: a humanitarian Marxist who emphasized the importance of personal autonomy and equality. Between 1970 and 1972 he wrote a book, with György Bence and György Márkus, arguing that these Marxist ideals were incompatible with Communist political institutions: the book was suppressed—it was only published in 1992—and in 1973 Kis, as well as others who shared his views, were fired from their academic positions. He was banned from all academic work and not permitted to leave Hungary. He supported himself translating philosophical classics into Hungarian, including works by Rousseau, Fichte and Kant. But in the mid-seventies he began to work with others in the formation of a democratic opposition to the Communist government; in 1981 he founded an underground political journal, Beszélő, and was its editorin -chief until 1989. He played an active role in Hungary’s transition to democracy in 1989 and 1990, and was a co-founder and first chairman of Hungary’s liberal political party, the Alliance of Free Democrats. He is now a professor of political science and philosophy xii at the Central European University in Budapest, and has taught at several universities in other countries, including the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris, the New School for Social Research in New York, and, repeatedly, the New York University School of Law. Kis’s philosophical work since the mid-seventies is marked by a steady and thoughtful transition from his early humanistic Marxism to the egalitarian liberalism he now represents. The first, unpublished book he wrote with co-authors attempted what he later called an immanent critique of Marxism: he criticized Marx’s institutional designs for state socialism by arguing that these could not realize, but could only subvert, what he took to be Marx’s underlying humanitarian ideals. By the late seventies he had become dissatisfied with those ideals as well; in his book, Do We Have Human Rights (published in Budapest: AB Independent Publishers, 1985. 2nd, revised and enlarged edition: Paris: Magyar Füzetek Könyvei, 1987), he said he had come to think that the idea of basic human rights, which Marx had dismissed as an epiphenomenon of alienation, was indispensable to any concrete realization of human equality and autonomy . Kis firmly rejected the dichotomy that has appealed to so many Central European intellectuals and politicians: that rejecting Communism meant rejecting equality, and embracing an unimpeded free market and an unconstrained democratic majoritarianism. He has also rejected a form of political pluralism that has appealed to many political philosophers: this supposes that liberty, equality and democracy are rival values that must conflict in political practice so that compromises among them are necessary. He has, on the contrary , worked with great subtlety to create conceptions of liberal equality and constitutional democracy in which these great values reinforce rather than undermine one another. His success is evident in his most recent book, Constitutional Democracy (published in English translation in 2003 by Central European University Press). That book is witness to another virtue of Kis’s writing. Even his most abstract political philosophy remains embedded in and addressed to the politics he knows first hand. “The studies collected in this volume,” he says, “reflect political debates provoked by the transition from communism to democracy in the fatherland of its author, Hungary.” I have had the luck to listen to and talk with János Kis in several countries and on several different kinds of occasions, from xiii formal seminars and colloquia to informal shared meals. But I remember most vividly an occasion now several years ago, when I watched him speaking to a large audience in Budapest about free speech. He said that speech must be...