“One should not expect to get away with impunity for living in England,” László Péter (1929–2008) is quoted by one of his colleagues in the introduction of this posthumous collection of essays. An emigré of the 1956 revolution, this master of Hungarian constitutional history did not live long enough to see this volume published. Its publication is the result of the devoted and meticulous work of his younger Hungarian colleague, Miklós Lojkó. After years in Oxford as a student and decades at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London as a teacher, Péter was as much a Briton as Hungarian soil is able to produce. Sharp observations and provocative remarks were his most efficient tools. For example, he once titled one of his essays (though not one included in this volume): “Was There a Hungarian Society in the Nineteenth Century?”

Comprised of fourteen chapters, all previously published but rewritten, in some cases extensively, this volume is somewhat surprisingly Péter's first English-language book following the Hungarian Az Elbától keletre [East of the Elbe] (Budapest, 1998) and his German book-length chapter “Die Verfassungsentwicklung in Ungarn” (in Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. VII, [Vienna, 2000]). Most of the essays address constitutional development in nineteenth-century Hungary. His main interest was in political institutions and ideas, although his strength lay in the minute analysis of terms, concepts, and texts. Words that, he stresses, do not just describe but often create the things to which they refer. He shows how Hungarians came to see their customs as an unwritten “constitution” under the direct influence of Montesquieu. Péter also points to the fact that there has never existed a mutually agreed upon common interpretation of this unwritten constitution: There were only rival interpretations of the estates of Hungary and the Crown. As they were mutually dependent on each other, there was a constant necessity to find a compromise. Thus, an important long-term feature of Hungarian political life from the diaetalis tractatus of the early nineteenth century to the roundtable talks of Communists and opposition in 1989 is the preference for wider political pacts rather than the strict application of the majority principle. He shows in a long essay that despite its medieval and early modern origins, the doctrine of the “Holy Crown of Hungary” is an invented tradition of the late nineteenth century.

In his interpretation of nineteenth-century Hungarian history, Péter refers back to contemporaries’ own understanding of words and phrases. He depicts King and regnum (ország) facing each other, each having the reservata, a restricted sphere of rights, and sharing with the other the rest, the communicata. He also interprets the 1867 Settlement (note his insistence on this term) in this light, not as a compromise of Austria and Hungary but as that of Hungary's King and regnum. On one hand, his interpretation can be seen as old-fashioned (his references reveal him as a direct successor to Otto Hintze and especially Otto Brunner); on the other hand, he fits within a new cultural history that takes contemporary representations as its primary subject. One way or another, Péter's writings were diametrically opposed to contemporary Hungarian historiography, with its social historical character, influenced or even dominated by Marxism. He questioned some established myths of Hungarian history, but—as András Cieger has recently pointed out—Hungarian historians of the nineteenth century have been reluctant to accept his interpretations (“A magyar alkotmányosság mítoszai és tradíciói [Myths and Traditions of the Hungarian Constitution],” Budapesti Könyvszemle 24 (2012): 194).

Péter also had a clear-cut view of the development of Hungarian state and civil society. He maintained that “east of the Elbe” the praesumptio iuris stood on the side of the state and not on that of individuals, that is, the state was free to act in all the areas where the individuals’ rights were not protected by statute law (instead of being restricted to what the law explicitly allowed it, as in the West). As members of the Hungarian elite in the late nineteenth century saw the state as the bulwark against the Hungarians’ dominance over the national minorities of the country, amounting to half of its population, they preferred to strengthen the state, thus barring the way for the extension of political rights and the building of a modern civil society. Péter saw the growth of the power of the state and the accompanying ideology of Hungarian estatism as mainly responsible for the unfortunate developments of Hungary's short twentieth century. Partly based on his personal encounter with Stalinism, he argued against any extension of the power of the state in the political debates in the Hungary of the 1990s, and for an enlarged freedom of action for civil society—as a Briton, in fact, might be expected to do.