Dissolution of Communist Power

The speed and seeming ease with which the communist systems of Eastern Europe collapsed raise interesting questions about the stability of the structure that held them in place. The book explains the demise of communist power by analysing in detail the internal apparatus of the communist regime in Hungary shortly before these historic changes took place.

Originally published in English in 1992, the book is based on unique empirical material: the result of a sociological survey carried out in 1988 in the district level communist party committees of Budapest. Extensive interviewing and direct questionnaires to party workers revealed the extent of the interpenetration of communist power and society but also began to reveal the gradual self-elimination process of the communist system. As events gathered momentum in Hungary, the data gained significance as the documentation of a system in dissolution.

The study uses the methods of Foucault to provide insight into the social relationships of the old system and the connected problems of the post-communist epoch.

Agnes Horvath is a political anthropologist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, and president of the International Political Anthropology Association, she was an affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma (2013), Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded (2021), Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality (2024), and Gnostic Fools: The Occult Origins of Our Ideological Age (2026); the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary (1992), Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (2018), and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology (2020); and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (2015), Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations (2019), Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion (2019), Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery (2020), and Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism (2022).

Arpad Szakolczai is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland, and is now Senior Fellow at the St. Gallen Collegium of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (2025-26). Born and educated in Hungary, has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (1987), taught social theory at the European University Institute (1990-98), and was ERC panel member (SH5, 2011-8). His recent books include Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena (2013), Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary (2016), Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017), Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (with Agnes Horvath, Routledge, 2018), From Anthropology to Social Theory (with Bjørn Thomassen, Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology (with Agnes Horvath, Routledge, 2020), Il gioco permanente con i limiti: La pandemia, il malinteso dell’universalismo e gli imbrogli della teoria economica (Ensemble, 2021), Post Truth Society: A political anthropology of trickster logic (Routledge, 2022), Political Anthropology as Method (Routledge, 2023), and Elgar Encyclopaedia of Political Anthropology (edited with Paul O’Connor, Edward Elgar, 2025).