Towards “an Adequately Complex, Well Thought Out and Empirically Grounded View of Society”

The paper takes a critical approach to Márk Áron Éber’s work, in which the author declared his intention, namely to outline “an adequately complex and well thought out, empirically grounded view of society.” Although we defined our critical remarks on the basis of the main conclusion of the book, we focused on some problematic theses based on socio-historical notions employed in this work. Discussed are among others notions with regard to the development of Hungarian society, like belated development, double embeddedness, or the visibility of the class-structure of Hungarian society, or the question of what is causing the dissolution of welfare states: radicalisation or problems of maintainability. The theses formulated with respect to these concepts are seen as questionable, which has its fundaments in the lack of an empirically established view of society. All this leads to the emergence of disordered notions.