Among the globe's nearly 200 countries, Hungary is called home by just over one of every 800 persons now resident on the globe. Even though this landlocked country has provided more than its share of cultural and scientific achievement, its politics are most often recognized on scales measured in multiple decades, and imaged by dramatic transitional events: its shrinkage by the treaty of Versailles in 1919; its rule by the man on the white horse through the interwar period; the agony of its Jewish population during the Holocaust; the heroism of its youth in resisting the Soviet occupation of 1956; its peaceful turn toward capitalism and democracy in 1989; and, particularly since 2010, its acquiescence to the governance of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The international press of record typically summarizes this most recent development in crisp paragraphs. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it this way on August 28, 2020 in a piece titled “An American Disaster Foretold”:

If this small landlocked country with its not very large population has indeed found a governance template capable of instructing Donald Trump on how to (mis?)govern the United States, then that template is surely worth the attention of academic political scientists, historians, legal scholars, other social scientists, and the proverbial intelligent lay reader. Happily, the volume under this review, Brave New Hungary, makes its timely appearance.

The volume is co-edited by two historians: János Mátyás Kovács of the University of Vienna and Balázs Trencsényi of Central European University. Contributed chapters are provided by seventeen additional scholars, most of whom are Hungarian and each of whom has already contributed significantly by their works and careers. Brave New Hungary sets as its task the understanding of the template of governance provided by the “System of National Cooperation as established by the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidész), functioning under the long and consistent leadership of its founder, Viktor Orbán.

The volume focuses on the “System of National Cooperation,” the corporatist template that undergirds the rapidly written Constitution, or “Fundamental Law” of 2010, designed to ensure the hold of the Fidész party on the country as values of “work, home, family, health and order” (16). Individual chapters address the institutional components of this jerry-built (or, maybe better, Viktor-built) system, providing sufficient detail for readers seeking to probe the recent Hungarian experience in ways the scholarly literature rarely permits. The space allotted this review does not permit commentary on these useful and intelligent contributions. Suffice it to say that valuable chapters cover such topics as civil society, minority relations, religion, economics, social policy, propaganda, higher education, standing as a mafia state, and relations with the EU. There are few pages from which this reviewer has not gained new understandings of a country in which he has spent much time over the past decade.

The co-editors provide a substantial concluding chapter which clearly summarizes the previous chapters and brings together the guiding elements of Orbán's successful “realistic dystopia”: do, rather than think; re-sacralize mass politics; use racist, homophobic, and chauvinistic language in populist offenses; degrade welfare services and workers’ rights; create state controlled corporatist organizations; raise suspicion of intellectuals, Eurocrats, bankers, lawyers, judges, students, feminists, foreigners, and Jews; blame the poor for their poverty; tolerate rule bending; pay lip service to religion but ignore its moral values; echo the culture of Hungarian lower and middle classes; drift past the populist right toward a hard authoritarian rule bordering on autocracy; replace capitalism with the “work based society”; assure continuity of power by developing an “electoral success generator” (380–88).

Pithily, the editors assert that Orbán emulates “how other would-be authoritarian politicians used to seize power:…by conquering their party with the help of its apparatus and friendly oligarchs, then conquering the state with the help of the party, and finally conquering society with the help of the party–state” (389). Blending left and right (Mikolós Horthy and János Kadar) in a political “simulacrum,” they observe that Orbán has learned “that by cleverly mixing a reliance on acquisitive attitudes with primordial fear, as well as magnifying these with brand-new techniques of aggressive manipulation, his party could exert a vast influence on the citizenry….Orbán's ruthless brainwashing and intimidation should not be mistaken for charisma. In our view, he has always been a sober political analyst, a stone hard-hearted commander, and a lucky gambler rather than a magician” (391).

Speaking for their team of authors, the coeditors catalog a list of thirty-four labels that may be plausibly be attached to the contemporary Hungarian regime. Here are my favorites from the list: autocracy, liberal autocracy, post-communist mafia state, post-communist neoconservatism, mutant/soft fascism, hybrid counterrevolutionary regime, competitive/electoral authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, party-state regime, cleptocracy, right-wing populism, political capitalism, and crony capitalism (382).

Unlike so many co-edited volumes, this one is brilliantly organized, tightly edited, and carefully presented in the English language. The co-editors reach an intriguing conclusion for their team, noting that, “One thing is certain: any attempt to discontinue the authoritarian muddling through in all important fields, even for a while, carries the risk of discrediting the revolution, ridiculing the ‘supreme revolutionary,’ and may result in the ex- or implosion of his regime” (418).