The present paper analyzes the implementation of the simplification law in Hungarian public administration between 1900 and 1910. The law was enacted in 1901 in a bid to »simplify, facilitate, and speed up« administrative processes and mitigate encounters between different administrative units. The law created an extended debate on the possible directions of simplification and resulted in a mixed reception, including an oftentimes contested implementation. The paper investigates the logic behind the reform both in terms of the legal and practical formulation of revised regulations and in terms of the actual implementation of the directives on the local level. I argue that “simplification” was a buzzword for the homogenization and rationalization of public administration that was considered inept to accommodate the new and expanding tasks of the state by the turn of the century. ›Simplification,‹ hence, resulted in a more complicated system, an oxymoron quickly flagged by contemporaries. The simplification law is understood in the present paper as a case of innovation, and the paper thus contributes to our understanding of innovation processes in public administration. The paper asks how the simplification law was implemented based on the micropractices of administrators, what were the practical consequences of the law in relation to the purposes of lawmakers, who were the main agents that influenced the process, and how they could press their own agendas in the process. These questions are approached through the lens of the materiality of public administration, in which people, objects, and material processes can explain the outcome of innovation initiatives, as in the case of the implementation of the simplification law.

To enter the circle: Brigitta Balogh’s reading of Hegel – Brigitta Balogh, The Spirit and Time: Identity, action and temporality in Hegel’s ‘The Phenomenology of Reason’ (Review) Brigitta Balogh, The Spirit and Time: Identity, action and temporality in Hegel’s ‘The Phenomenology of Reason.’ Budapest, L’Harmattan, 2009.

Hungarian imperial thought after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy became a fantasy of past times, and thus the imperial propaganda of Rezső Havass was long irrelevant by the time of his death in 1927. In spite of this, Havass was called the “wholehearted devotee of Hungarian imperialism” in his obituary, a man who believed in further Hungarian expansion with the faith of prophets and whose goal was to resurrect the imperium of Louis I of Hungary. The present study analyzes the career trajectory of Rezső Havass and his multiple and overlapping identities in order to uncover the different faces of Hungarian imperialism before the Great War. Havass was a “bourgeois citizen,” a “Hungarian fanatic,” “a scholar,” and a “clerk and chairman of business companies,” or in other words, he had an array of identities which made him capable of using historic, legal, political, and economic arguments to aid the advancement of Hungarian imperialism. For Havass, the Hungarian Kingdom was undoubtedly a would-be-colonial empire with well-defined political goals (the colonization of Dalmatia), and his texts mixed and vulgarized elements of the sciences subordinated to political goals. For instance, it is relevant that the empire was a facilitating factor for geographical scholarship in the case of Havass, besides the obvious political leanings. My main research question concerns the modalities of imperial thought in Hungary through the case study of Rezső Havass. What did it consist of? How did it compare to other notions of imperialism and economic expansionism? And how widespread was it in the public sphere in Hungary?

The present article studies the construction of statistical knowledge based on mortality tables compiled by government agencies (statisticians) and insurance companies (actuaries) in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy between the 1860s and the 1910s. The logic and function of mortality statistics were fundamentally distinct in the two contexts. The article argues that statisticians and actuaries constructed their object of analysis and applied mathematical and statistical tools with contrasting aims in mind: social reform for the former, and the profitability of insurance companies for the latter. These aspects not only determined the choice of methods but also their stance on objectivity and their epistemological approach to the whole exercise.

No abstract