Democracy or Popular Government? The Political Thought of Mihály Táncsics in the Vormärz
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'. Click here to see other posts in the series.
Mihály Táncsics (1799–1884) is an outstanding representative of nineteenth-century radical and early socialist thought in Hungary. His writings from the 1840s articulated a Hungarian version of utopian socialism, left-wing republicanism, progressive agrarianism, and bourgeois radicalism. ‘Democracy’ was rarely an express conceptual component, yet he essentially articulated a plebian-democratic vision for the pre-1848 Kingdom of Hungary.
Táncsics was born in 1799 in Ácsteszér, a small village some 100 kilometers west of today’s Budapest, into a magyarized peasant family. His father had Croatian roots, while his mother came from a Slovak family. As a child, he worked with his siblings on the family farm, then as a weaver, but in 1822 he was accepted as a pupil in Buda and went on to attend schools in Kecskemét, Nitra/Nyitra, and Pest, taking courses in Hungarian language and grammar, Latin, German, and French and the classical liberal arts, while also working as an in-house tutor to noble families. In 1828, he enrolled in the Royal University of Pest to study liberal arts and law, later turning toward Hungarian linguistics. He never graduated.
During the 1830s he began to write Hungarian grammar, language, history, and geography textbooks for primary- and secondary-school students. These were highly popular—so much so that his Hungarian and German Conversations and Language Exercises (1833) found its way into the household of Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, who baulked at the subversive undertone and brought it before the Vice-Regency Council (Helytartótanács), which banned it, ordered its confiscation, and prohibited further publication.
Forced back into private tutoring, Táncsics developed a sharper, more direct, and openly radical political language in his writing. In the early 1840s he searched for printing houses abroad, settling on Leipzig, which was briefly the center of a burgeoning trade in Hungarian-language printed texts after 1831. Working with the émigré German printer Otto Wigand, who had lived in Hungary between 1811 and 1833, and looking for a variety of routes to circumvent the Saxon ban on publishing in Hungarian, Táncsics published A Slave’s Views on Press Freedom (1844) and Népkönyv (1846; Eng. ‘The People’s Book’).
‘Democracy’ had its supporters in Hungary before the rise of Napoleon, as elsewhere in Europe. The ‘Jacobin’ conspiracy of 1794–95 led by Ignác Martinovics failed to overthrow the Habsburgs or establish a republic, but left a lasting hunger for social transformation among Hungarian intellectuals. During the Napoleonic period, ‘democracy’ began to be equated with mob rule and was avoided in political circles. Surviving members of the ‘Jacobin’ conspiracy symptomatically focused on the Hungarian language (Kazinczy) and the agrarian economy of the Kingdom (Berzeviczy) as two relatively non-political spheres. Similarly, early liberalism in Hungary was almost exclusively articulated in the literary sphere until the 1820s, when a bourgeois transformation of feudal Hungary began to be put on the agenda. Post-Napoleonic Hungary still had a rich set of political languages: republicanism, the ‘ancient constitution’, enlightened governance, and cultural nationalism, but there was little room for ‘democracy’. Unsurprisingly, it barely appears in Táncsics’s early works.
Nonetheless, while not fully integrated into standard Hungarian, encyclopedic entries and journalistic discussions of democratia (in modern Hungarian, demokrácia) were available. György Zsivora’s 1831 entry on democratia in the encyclopedic Repository of Public Knowledge gave a relatively neutral overview of the concept, but concluded by insisting that “democracy as a form of government is deeply flawed, not so much because it cannot establish strong government for any length of time, but because it offers the fewest ways of overcoming the passions and prejudices of the people.”
By contrast, radicals like Táncsics most commonly used the concepts of freedom (szabadság), equality (egyenlőség), or independence (függetlenség), but as the objectives of the true political subject: either the collective people (nép), pluralized people (emberek, literally ‘humans’), or the free citoyen or Bürger (polgár). This usage subverted the standard meaning of these concepts in Hungarian political discourse, as freedom, equality, and independence were traditionally and exclusively used to describe the noble natio.
Such conceptual creativity meant that finding an alternative for ‘democracy’ was hardly an issue for radical thinkers. Táncsics’s Common Sense (written in 1843/44 but published only in 1848) compares two “bourgeois” or “civic” (polgári) constitutional systems: the French constitutional Charter of 1830 and the American “republican structure” (köztársasági szerkezet). His discussion of the American republic was based directly on Sándor Bölöni Farkas’s partial translation of the New Hampshire state constitution—published in his Journey in North America (1834)—which originally stated that: “All men are born equally free and independent: Therefore, all government, of right, originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good.” Bölöni Farkas translated this as: “Every person is born uniformly free and independent, consequently all government (igazgatóság) originates from the people (nép), is founded upon the people’s common consent (közmegegyezés), and instituted for the common good (közjó).” Táncsics, in his commentary on these ideas, clarified that “it is not only that [government] originates from the people, but that the people govern (igazgatja) themselves.”
In A Slave’s Views on Press Freedom (1844), Táncsics uses both ‘kormány’ and ‘igazgatóság’/‘igazgatás’ to mean ‘government’, but tends to contrast ‘kormány’—with its strong ship of state metaphor—with the latter. For Táncsics, ‘kormány’ referred to existing aristocratic or monarchic power, while ‘igazgatóság’/‘igazgatás’ referred to a ‘popular’ government of free citizens. Essentially, he exploited the agglutinative nature of Hungarian to elicit a new political meaning from ‘igazgatóság’/‘igazgatás’: ‘igaz’ refers to ‘truth’, ‘right’, or ‘justice’, the frequentative suffix -gat denotes repetitive action, so: igazgat can mean ‘to govern’, ‘to administer’, but also literally ‘to make or find truth’. Abstracted with the suffixes -ság or -ás, in Táncsics’s use ‘igazgatóság’/‘igazgatás’ stands for ‘government’ in a collective, common sense, ‘truth-seeking’ or ‘truth-making,’ among free, equal citizens.
1848 lithograph of Mihály Táncsics (1799-1884).
In fact, ‘democracy’ does appear once in Táncsics’s Common Sense, as an adjective, partially retaining its Latinate form rather than being fully ‘magyarized’: ‘democratikai’, that is, ‘democratic’. In his discussion of ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ (vallás), and his repudiation of organized religion and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in particular, he expounds his alternative scheme of a “Common-Sensical Creed,” stating: “I believe that a republic must precede common use (közhasználat). … The more a society takes on a democratic form (democratikai forma), the closer it is to common use.”
For Táncsics, a republic would provide the form of state; democracy, the form of society. Combined, they invoke the curious concept of közhasználat, or ‘common use’. Elsewhere he wrote: “I believe absolutely that alienated property will one day cease to exist and will be replaced by common use [közhasználat] or that which is held in common [közösség] (communismus).” His idea of a future social form is bound up in a stadial, progressive vision of historical development: a republican state coupled with a democratic (or ‘democratized’) society requires the delegation of governance from the monarch, court, and estates to the people themselves. In Táncsics’s re-working of the concept igazgatóság/igazgatás, the embourgeoisement (polgárosodás) of the country is seen as the development of a free citizenry leading the transition out of feudal society. With the realization of this “democratic form,” as Táncsics puts it, the human community reaches a point where private property begins to disappear, and “common use” arises.
Táncsics did not have a Marxian idea of ‘communismus’ in mind, however. Drawing specifically on Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1842 ed.), and the chapter on the “Opinions of Some Philosophes on Equality and Community” in particular, he claimed that on “…these aforementioned pages, eminent and great men are mentioned who spoke out against property and for common use (közhasználat); … the idea is not a novelty, in fact, it has never been erased from the minds of men.” He cites Cabet, but implicitly a host of ‘great thinkers’ from Zoroaster, Confucius, and Plato down to Thomas Paine, Robert Owen, and Alphonse de Lamartine, and inserts himself in a genealogy of the idea of communismus. The result was a horizon of political expectation that included a republican state and a democratized society, and so the potential realization of ‘communismus’, közhasználat, or a complete social form centered on common use.
Táncsics travelled abroad in the summer of 1846 (on the journey, he met Cabet personally in Paris), but on his return a warrant was issued for his arrest. While in hiding in rural Slavonia, he wrote his most radical pre-1848 essay: Nép szava, Isten szava: “The Word of the People is the Word of God.” This pamphlet called for the uncompensated expropriation of the unproductive estates of the Hungarian nobility; the release of the peasantry from corvée labor and taxes on vineyards and wine production; the elimination of estate- or rank-based privileges; and the abolition of the censorship regime. Táncsics had turned decisively toward revolution to bring Hungary out of its feudal inertia and toward the democratization of society and the establishment of a republican-democratic state. However, the explicit concept ‘democracy’ remained uninvoked.
Táncsics was betrayed, arrested in March 1847, and interned in the prison of the Royal Vice-Regency in Buda. On March 12, a report on his arrest by the Hungarian Court Chancellery (Magyar udvari kancellária) listed books and unpublished manuscripts seized, including Common Sense, in which “… communist principles are defended, and almost all the foundations of civil society are destroyed.” His books ranged from works on linguistics and grammar, to religion and the natural sciences, but also included some of Marx’s early texts in French, Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, Lessing’s Werke, and contributions by French utopians, German Romantics, and Austrian and Hungarian liberals: a veritable cornucopia of radical thought from around Europe.
After nearly a year in prison, Táncsics was freed on March 15, 1848, only hours after the beginning of the Hungarian Revolution. He had been an idol for the radical “Young Hungary” movement (Petőfi, Jókai, Vasvári), who led the delegation to free him. The drive toward the democratization of Hungary was still limited to a small circle of radicals; the most prominent ideals were of freedom, equality, independence, brotherhood, and true patriotism (as against the ‘false’ patriotism of Habsburg loyalty). ‘Democracy’ as a concept arrived relatively late. Nonetheless, the push toward the emancipation of feudal subjects and their re-creation as free citizens remained at the forefront of these radicals’ visions. This set the intellectual foundations for the increasing, positive, and subversive use of the concept ‘democracy’ by the left in Hungary in the decades which followed, during which Táncsics continued to play an important role, writing, publishing, and agitating for his vision of a society based on ‘common use’.
The first socialist trade unions and workers’ parties in the Kingdom of Hungary began to organize in the late 1860s. Táncsics was elected president of the General Workers’ Union (Általános Munkásegylet) in 1869, and the organization soon began to formulate its demands with reference to ideas of ‘social democracy’ (at first: társadalmi demokrácia, later: szociáldemokrácia). This conceptual usage was fostered in large part by the foundational reception of European socialist ideas by Táncsics and his interlocutors from the 1840s to the ‘70s and the slow but positive (re-)emergence of the concept ‘democracy’ across Europe in the same period.
Táncsics died in 1884. Over the following century, he came to be hailed as a ‘radical democrat,’ a ‘plebian democrat’, and a ‘revolutionary democrat’, seen as the forebearer of the socialist movement in Hungary through the twentieth century. While these laudatory remarks often overstated the place of the concept ‘democracy’ in Táncsics’s work, especially before 1848, he was one of the major figures sketching the conceptual trails that later thinkers followed. ‘Demokrácia’ became easier to articulate than ever before—even if Táncsics’s particular vision remains unrealized.
Cody James Inglis, Central European University, Vienna
