Rolling Transition is a deeply researched microanalysis of roughly 2,000 Hungarian intellectuals as they navigated 15 years of a “rolling transition” centered around the iconic year of 1989. It is also a theoretically rich study of the role of intellectuals in world-historical moments more generally. András Bozoki has written the most nuanced account yet of the transition from one-party state to multiparty democracy in Soviet-dominated Europe. By focusing on the intellectuals who struggled to understand their role in history as history was changing day by day, Bozoki provides a compelling account of why ideas matter at revolutionary moments.

The book’s narrative arc starts by situating 1989 in a century of literature that focuses on the leading role of intellectuals in the process of social transformation (chap. 1) and ends with demonstrating how the particular set of intellectuals who pushed the reform process along in Hungary over nearly two decades was not one bloc of people who stayed the same over time but was instead a “rolling” set of diverse individuals who ducked in and out of this process at different stages, playing different roles as their talents and commitments permitted (chap. 9, co-written with Ágnes Simon). While intellectuals as a group may have been essential to Hungary’s transformation, the divisions within the group over strategy and tactics meant that they were constantly debating each other, almost to the point of failing to constitute a coherent opposition force. (Those who follow contemporary Hungarian politics will find this familiar!)

Bozoki argues that “during the era of dictatorship it was the intellectuals who ‘substituted for’ democracy and kept national consciousness alive” (p. 206). Once multiparty democracy became possible, it was the intellectuals who “reconquer[ed] … the language of freedom” (p. 207). In short, Bozoki demonstrates how intellectuals in Hungary drove the process of political transformation by constantly testing the boundaries of the Soviet system and finally by engaging in negotiations over the peaceful transfer of power. They then occupied many of the key roles in the new system, both in the roundtable negotiations and in the new parliament.

Bozoki challenges many of the now taken-for-granted accounts of what happened in and around the year that the Berlin Wall fell. Instead of seeing 1989 as driven primarily by the change of leadership in the Soviet Union and the improvised reactions of surprised “satellite” states, Bozoki focuses primarily on the internal politics of Hungary, the first country in the region to engage in economic reform in the 1960s. When General Secretary János Kádár loosened rules on censorship in Hungary in the 1970s just enough to allow intellectuals space for maneuver (chap. 2), intellectuals occupied that space with different samizdat journals and a rich set of “civil society” institutions ranging from churches to environmental groups (chap. 3). As the regime loosened its grip further and opened up more space for political contestation, intellectuals began to debate their proper role in relation to political power, from an “antipolitical” stance that emphasized building social solidarity instead of engaging politics directly to theoretical debates over how to constitute a “democratic opposition” in politics with a focus on human rights (chap. 4).

As it gradually became clear through the 1980s that both new economics and new politics were possible, Bozoki’s intellectuals reoriented their theories yet again to adapt (chap. 5), all the while arguing with each other over which adaptations were justifiable in the circumstances. The opportunity made possible by roundtable talks in 1989 required the opposition to develop a common position against the regime, something that was a challenge as the opposition had before that time specialized primarily in arguing among themselves (chap. 6). After the first multiparty elections in which opposition intellectuals again resumed their oppositional relationships to each other (chap. 7), some intellectuals made the leap into politics while others stayed on the sidelines (chap. 8).

Bozoki makes available in English for the first time the vibrant culture of theoretical debate that existed during this period and shows how the very culture of disagreement that made Hungarian intellectual life so rich also made it challenging for the intellectual opposition either to unite in a common cause or to create a mass movement jointly with others. Intellectuals played decisive roles once the regime type was up for grabs but they did so as self-appointed, relatively isolated clusters of individuals rather than through a mass organization confronting the regime with common demands as Solidarity did in Poland.

The book’s main strength is also its greatest weakness: the extraordinary level of detail that turns these 15 years among these 2,000 people into a grand sociohistorical analysis. At 600+ pages, one needs a great deal of patience (or in my case, to have personally known many of those mentioned in the book) to keep reading every word. But the detail is precisely what makes the book a masterpiece. Because it summarizes the voluminous writings of Hungarian intellectuals in this crucial period, Rolling Transition is not only a theoretically important analysis in its own right, but it will become a primary source that future researchers will need to understand this period.

Only Bozoki could have written this book. He was simultaneously a participant in the events he discusses and also a longtime chronicler of the political transition in Hungary. His eight-volume edited transcript (in Hungarian), A rendszerváltás forgatókönyve: Kerekasztal-tárgyalások 1989-ben (The Script of the Regime Change: Roundtable Talks in 1989, 1999–2000) of the opposition roundtable negotiations and the one-volume analysis (in English) of the transition they ushered in (The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy, 2002) are the best sources for those pivotal discussions, along with his many books and articles that have made the Hungarian experience of transition into and out of democracy visible. Rolling Transition is the result of decades of interviews, archives, statistics, and experience, and it is that rarest of rare books, one that has comprehensively reconstructed how those living through a major political transition made sense of it at the time while putting their ideas in a grander theoretical context.

Those looking to understand why Hungary fell into autocracy under Viktor Orbán a mere two decades later will be disappointed, and not just because the book ends in 1994. Orbán’s insistence in the opposition roundtable meetings on negotiating with the Communist party instead of with the government, and his refusal to sign onto the governance pact negotiated between the largest parties in the government and opposition after the first multiparty election in 1990, hinted that he was not a team player, but was instead unduly interested in the techniques of power monopolization. Even though he was present from 1988 onward in the debates that Bozoki catalogues, Orbán exists only at the margins of this story.

Perhaps that is as it should be. With his focus on ideas at the end of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Bozoki makes accessible the impressive intellectual debates among those living through those important decades, struggling to understand their own place in a history that indeed did not end in 1989. Just as Bozoki’s intellectuals had no idea that the old system could be so fundamentally transformed when it was, so too could they probably not have imagined that someone at the edges of these debates would monopolize power again so soon.