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Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically traces how historical romantic tropes appear as a powerful driving force behind the consolidation of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime in Hungary, and how this revolutionary Romanticism seeks to redefine the political future of the European Union.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from the consideration that the establishment of a new political regime also means epistemic change, this paper looks at the ways in which illiberal knowledge politics in Hungary draws on the Romantic tradition that emphasizes community and emotions as a source of knowledge. I outline how next to institutional and economic control, the Fidesz regime has attempted to dominate the Hungarian intellectual sphere through knowledge institutions from art institutions to media, centralized education, research centres, universities, and finally extensive state-commissioned propaganda campaigns. I show how the knowledge emanating from this realm skillfully draws from a century-long epistemic divide in Hungarian public life known as the ethnopopulist vs. urban divide (népi-urbánus ellentét), with the former emphasizing community over the individual, rural over the urban, and the national over the cosmopolitan. How does 2020s Romanticism look like in the Hungarian context, and why is it so compelling as a political force? Considering that Hungary’s role in the European Union as economically integral but politically disruptive, how does the Fidesz regime’s national project of illiberal epistemology spill out to the European arena? How are goodness and future articulated in this Romanticism, and what are its limitations? Drawing on ethnography in communal events organized by Fidesz in Budapest, I trace the reappearance of revolutionary Romanticism as a driving political force in Hungary, and argue that it plays an instrumental role in illiberal epistemology that seeks to redefine European politics far into the future.