Ágnes Heller

Ágnes Heller (1929) is a Hungarian philosopher based in Budapest and New York. The author of numerous scholarly books in various philosophical fields, she is one of the most prominent disciples of Georg Lukács. She was dismissed from her teaching post at the University of Budapest in 1958, but found refuge as a member of the newly founded Sociology Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1963. After Lukács’’s death in 1971, there was no one to protect his followers against political harassment, and many of them, including Heller and her husband, Ferenc Fehér, felt forced to emigrate in 1977. She taught at the University of Melbourne until 1986, when she was appointed Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. Since 1989, she has also taught in Hungary.

Anti-Semitism in Hungary is stronger than ever

Ágnes Heller

Some Hungarian media such as “Echo TV”, “Magyar Hírlap”, “Magyar Demokrata” and to some extent also “Magyar Nemzet”, have published anti-Semitic statements of a kind that would not be possible in mainstream media in Western Europe. Yes, in Hungary you can have anti-Semitic discourse that is impossible in Western Europe. Some people began to make openly anti-Semitic statements right after 1989, and when they saw that Hungarian society showed almost no resistance to it, they felt reassured and continued to do so. I believe that only a small number of Hungarians are actually anti-Semitic but only a few have stood […]