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• Solidarity in question – the ambivalences of helping interactions in late modern Hungary: Editorial foreword

  5-9

  Domonkos Sik

  Views:

  49

  Editorial foreword

• Solidarity and autonomy in times of an epidemic

  47-73

  Domonkos Sik

  Views:

  45

  The paper seeks to answer the question: what patterns of solidarity and autonomy can be identified in the Hungarian context of late modernity. The specific difficulty of answering this question is that it refers to social structures, which are naturalized interpretations of reality, thus exist mostly at an unreflective, preintentional level. In order to address this difficulty, our research has considered the COVID epidemic as a natural experimental situation: while the paradoxes and distortions of solidarity and autonomy, are usually naturalized by the actors, during the COVID they become reflected. The first section of the paper develops theoretical idealtypes of autonomy and solidarity specialised to the Hungarian social historical context. Then, after a brief methodological overview, I will present different patterns of solidarity and autonomy in the form of case studies. In the final section, the general conclusions are drawn from these cases, while an attempt is made to answer the question: how do the actors cope with modernisation structures that narrow the space of solidarity and autonomy and are characterized by fundamental paradoxes?

• Incubating radicalism in Hungary – the case of Sopron and Ózd

  79-102.

  Domonkos Sik

  Views:

  46

  The paper analyses young people’s interpretation of the past, evaluation of the present and po-litical behaviour patterns based on semi-structured interviews (n=60) conducted in two contra-sting constellations of modernization, Sopron and Ózd. First the perception of the most pressing social and political problems, second the potential of political and civic actions are compared. Finally an attempt is made to outline a ‚hopeless’ and an ‚indifferent’ idealtype of political cultu-re. Together they create the opportunity for both the birth of antidemocratic tendencies and the space in which they can evolve. In this sense they provide the preconditions for ‚mainstreaming the extreme’ that is the incubation of radicalism in Hungary.

• Entangled in the web of solidarity paradoxes – from the moral contradictions of helping to the dysfunctions the welfare system

  51-85

  Domonkos Sik

  Views:

  74

  The article aims at analysing the idealtypical paradoxes of solidarity in a Hungarian rural
  community. The case study focuses on helping processes embedded in various integration
  mechanisms (including conservatory, reflexive and cybernetical ones – Sik 2015), while
  reconstructing the perspectives of the helping and the supported actors. During the field work
  interviews (n=22), small surveys (n=95) and observations (1 week) were collected, which were
  interpreted in several turns. The results of the research reveal the idealtypical paradoxes of
  solidarity in various social spaces, and also the consequences of their accumulation. According to
  our conclusion, it is particularly important to reflect upon these latter, mostly latent paradoxes,
  as their treatment is indispensable for any spontaneous or expert social interventions.