Knowledge and Opinion about Law (KOL) research in socialist Hungary

Abstract

Abstract. The critical assessment of the legacy of socialist jurisprudence is amongst one of the most difficult tasks of the post-transitory Central-European legal thinking. This study provides a critical reading of the findings of Hungarian socialist legal sociology with respect to the description and analysis of the socialist legal culture. The discussion starts with the first comprehensive empirical survey on the legal knowledge of the population, designed and carried out by Kálmán Kulcsár in 1965 and ends with András Sajó's synthesis on the nature of the Hungarian socialist legal culture elaborated in his monograph entitled Illusion and Reality in Law, published in 1986. The paper's main conclusion is that this two decades long 'golden age' of Hungarian legal sociology offers many valid points in both methodological and substantive terms contrary to the fact that the various findings were mainly elaborated under the pressure of official Marxism-Leninism.

Knowledge and Opinion about Law – The Importance of Law-related Education

“…K á lm á n Kulcs á r, later Hungarian Minister of Justice, carried out a representative survey in Hungary in 1965 to assess the legal knowledge of the Hungarian population. A follow-up was carried out in 2013, focused on measuring how the knowledge of people about some legal rules has changed since (Fekete and Szil á gyi 2017).…”

Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law

“…T he issue of rights consciousness has not attracted wide attention among the Hungarian socio-legal scholarship. Although legal sociology had a certain role in the former Socialist legal academia (Fekete and H. Szilágyi 2017), it mainly subscribed to the so-called 'knowledge and opinion about law' (KOL) tradition of socio-legal research -which was rather popular in the 60s and 70s in Western scholarship (cf Podgórecki et al 1973) -thereby turning to quantitative research designs and macro issues. These were, inter alia, knowledge of the law (eg Kulcsár 1967) and the role of law in general social consciousness (eg Sajó 1981), but rights consciousness had only been touched upon marginally by András Sajó in a study addressing legal alienation in Hungarian society during the late 1980s.…”

Embarrassing Stories : Legal Storytelling and Sociology of Law

“…The cause of this delay should be sought, of course, in the five-decade-long enforced dominance of Marxism over the Hungarian social sciences. With respect to the legal consciousness research that begun in the middle of the 1960s (Fekete and Szilágyi, 2017), this meant that -fitting in the peculiar theoretical framework of 'socialist jurisprudence' -the notions of 'social-level legal consciousness' or 'social legal consciousness' took the place of 'legal culture. ' Since the concept and theoretical perspective of 'socialist jurisprudence' stayed alive more or less without any critical reflection in the last decade of the past century, so it still has an influence on contemporary legal sociology.⁸ The critical review of this intel- (Szabadfalvi, 2003;Szilágyi, 2011), in parallel with the increasing interest in the cultural approach to legal phenomena.…”

“…Inquiries led by Kálmán Kulcsár and András Sajó in the 1970s and 80s revealed a peculiar schizophrenia in Hungarians' legal minds. This was expressed by the following maxim: 'The law ought to be rigorous, and has to be enforced against everybody -except me' (Fekete & Szilágyi, 2017). Sajó characterized the Hungarians' relation to law with the 'hypocrite-parasitic' attributive in one of his essays written after the democratic changes (Sajó, 2008).…”