Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics : Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust

Examines the struggle that took place between liberal and anti-Semitic policies in the professional groups - doctors, lawyers and engineers - in Hungary from 1867 to 1945. Emphasis is placed on the interwar period, when previously liberal policies of equal opportunity were suppressed.

In this important new historical study, Mária Kovács examines the struggle between liberal and anti-Semitic policies among professional groups--doctors, lawyers, engineers--in Hungary from 1867 to 1945. Kovács''s main emphasis is on the interwar period when unemployment, expansion of the welfare system, and competition for state jobs during the Great Depression, combined with crass anti-Semitism on the part of engineers and medical associations, radically altered previously liberal policies of open entry and equal educational opportunity. Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics analyses to what extent these new policies were dictated by authoritarian governments from above and to what extent they originated within the professions themselves. The story ends with the Holocaust, which sealed the fate of those professionals who had become victims of persecution under the German occupation of Hungary.