This collection of essays, mostly from authors living in Hungary, offers a multitude of intelligent, informative, and often emotional writings about politics and society under the rule of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The editors assembled inquiries into basically two aspects of the unprecedented autocracy within the European Union. The first focus is a search for the secret of its success and longevity, by way of summarizing how post-Communism’s erstwhile pioneering democracy degenerated into a full-blown illiberal system of personal rule. The second focal point is the awakening of societal resistance against a constantly-tightened civic space.

I have to stress at this point that the reduction to these two main interests illustrates an essential trait of the Hungarian situation—and perhaps of all conditions that can be described as established illiberal democracies: that salvation will not and cannot come from the classic party political scene. Even as the system’s scenery is seen by the book’s authors as mostly shaped by Viktor Orbán’ resolute political and legal action, it is amply clear from their accounts that it is post-Communism’s own multiparty theater that had produced its own demise—the illiberal regime. An illiberal regime starts when its leader successfully eliminates the influence of its political rivals. The volume’s very binary structure takes it for granted that the opposition parties inside and outside Parliament are done, and that no rebirth can stem from them. For it seems clear that they have become stabilizing fillings in the system, and their main preoccupation of making it to Parliament via the made-up election rules works as a guarantee of the system’s “legitimacy” and “normalcy,” further weakening the international community’s possible influence, which is feeble enough by default.

Luckily, the different approaches in focus, method, and style are logically grouped in the anthology’s four main sections, entitled “Diagnosis,” “Symptoms,” “Immune Reactions,” and “Life Perspectives.” Editors Péter Krasztev and Jon van Til were right to liken Hungary to a sick patient. For this is a country where the government in 2010 officially obliged all civil servants to call the government a new system (that is, the “System of National Co-operation”) in a proud wholesale negation of the liberal constitutionalism of the “West,” and where the illiberal political and constitutional skeleton reveals almost nothing about the actual functioning of the organism.

Section one, “Diagnosis,” brings systemic descriptions of how the regime was built politically and legally. This part includes essays by some of the best international experts of their fields (the political scientist András Bozóki; the constitutional scholars Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, and Kim Lane Scheppele; and Hungary’s last independent human rights Ombudsman, removed from office just for that reason, Máté Szabó). The pieces are thoroughly researched, scholarly objective, yet highly readable. University curricula will surely find all three pieces seminal must-reads into the subject.

The section on “Symptoms” collects case studies of particular social policies, all of which serve the goal either of direct domination by sheer power or indirect domination of society through a directed traditionalist, ethno-nationalist, pseudo-Christian, nativist public discourse. The subjects are the regime’s media policy; its church policies; the way the Roma minority is handled; “women’s policy”—yes, that is its official name—for gender is a banned word in official use, as it is seen as part of oppressive Western political correctness; and the issue of the radical right. The media and the churches were redefined by separately passed “cardinal” laws in 2010 which then made big waves internationally because of their radical illiberalism. The expert studies of Péter Bajomi-Lázár and Ágnes Kövér give an account of what happened afterwards, and how those legal texts, combined with further political moves, have served to streamline journalism and religious life.

Section three, “Immune Reaction,” consist of case studies, mostly by participants, of the regularly flaring up and dying down of societal responses to the ever-more prohibitive conditions that Orban’s system is imposing on civic movements. Except for the section’s introductory study by Péter Krasztev on the plight of civil society in a regional context, these pieces oscillate between a commemorative and a memoirist style, and sound victorious and vindictive, accordingly.

However, even these participatory accounts of the social movements (which are relatively less informative for a foreign audience despite their wealth of locally relevant data) testify to the fact that in an “advanced” illiberal regime the media and civil society are the only remaining forces that may produce a push towards re-liberalization and re-pluralization. That is perfectly in parallel with the fact that since 2000, and Vladimir Putin’s takeover in Russia, illiberalism’s ire has gone mostly against these two societal “disturbances.” Especially telling are the copycat campaigns of all illiberal governments to hinder, vilify, and even criminalize foreign aid to NGOs and independent media. As the book illustrates, Hungary is no exception.

The closing section, “Life Perspectives,” written by authors who live outside Hungary, offers enjoyable explorations of the divisive reception that Orban’s success generates both at home and abroad; these are studies into a neo-Weimarian culture of cold civil war, that is, the lack of any shared bonds inside the polity, a situation both utilized and exacerbated by Orban’s policies. Balázs Jarabik offers a surprising and well-documented comparison of Hungary’s illiberal democracy—which still claims to be no less than the embodiment of the “original” spirit of Europe—and the Belarus dictatorship that is the archetypical and straightforward post-Communist elimination of the newly obtained freedoms. Joseph B. Juhász’s chapter compares two bestsellers with the Hungarian public that treat Orban’s “achievements” very differently. The first book is a Polish-written praise of Orbán’s “freedom fight,” his rediscovery of the “national spirit,” and his revolution against Western norms. That book, Hajrá, magyarok, (or Go for it, Hungarians!) by Igor Janke, is juxtaposed with Hungarian Polyp: The Post-Communist Mafia State, written by famous Hungarian public intellectuals who joined the inspirational original concept of the book’s editor, former education minister Bálint Magyar (since the publication of The Hungarian Patient, Bálint Magyar’s own monograph has been published in English: Bálint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, a joint publication with Noran Libro, 2016). The book offers analyses of aspects of the Hungarian system as a super-corrupt machine where every political, legal, and ideological dimension is subordinated to the personal enrichment of the new Orbanite elite.

The closing chapter, by Jon van Till, argues that a cumulative civil-society revival that can defeat its own fragmentation and, in the process, reverse the fragmentation of the party political scene, is the only prospective response to Orbanism that might restore liberal democracy in Hungary. The author admits that so far, social opposition to Orban’s illiberal regime is no success story. Still, only a few seemingly anti-political, anti-party street actions, such as the Facebook-organized demonstration against the internet tax in 2014, and the students’ and teachers’ protests in the last two years, could make Orban evacuate some of his fortified lines. Similarly, the Norwegian Government’s stalwart support in 2015 for the human-rights NGOs, despite the Hungarian government’s decision to persecute them, shows how liberal democracies can act against the rise of illiberalism, by assisting civil society and by not giving in to the international community’s usual relativism. The book thus ends with a glimmer of hope, for Hungary and for other societies governed by illiberal regimes. But only a glimmer.