Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to set up a conceptual framework for dependent relations and the everyday moral evaluations of hierarchical incorporation including the exchange of personal favours and the impersonal forms of service provision.

Paper long abstract:

Instances of crises and various forms of moral deliberation are intertwined and mutually provoke one another. Our paper engages with the moral economy of clientelism and dependent relations amid multiple crises of livelihood and social reproduction. Research settings such as post-socialist and illiberal Hungary invite a perspective that considers the routinization and everyday management of crises through the cultivation of durable dependencies that pacify social antagonisms. After 2010, the labour activation scheme known as the ‘public work program’ aimed to re-involve surplus populations into the ‘world of work’, as a major showcase of the way illiberal-paternalist rule came to be solidified in Hungary. So far, the 2020s witnessed the diversification of dependent relations facilitated by the state and the market, including the agents of formal and informal brokers intermediating in the field of state subsidized loans or (in)formal work recruitment as new forms of clientelism.

Based on historical review as well as ethnographic research, we reconstruct forms of clientelism that represent different variants of the primary or ‘root form’ of the patron-client relation, connecting problem-holders and problem-solvers who exchange certain guarantees for security and well-being on the one hand and loyalty and support on the other. As we argue, clientelism and the patron-client relation may serve as a useful ideal type for studying the moral economy of political and economic forms of dependence and the everyday moral evaluations of hierarchical incorporation including the exchange of personal favours and the impersonal forms of service provision.