In what sense should István Bethlen and the regime that he constructed in 1920s Hungary be seen as counterrevolutionary? Certainly, Bethlen and his political allies had opposed Béla Kun's short-lived experiment in Bolshevik rule in 1919. And they were eager to restore order and stability to a country profoundly unsettled by defeat, revolution, and territorial loss. But did this amount to an ideological agenda? In his new book, Counter-Revolutionary Hungary, Thomas Lorman argues that it did not. “Ideology,” he asserts at the outset, “is not always the driving force in politics” (xiii). In order to get a truer picture of this turbulent period in Hungarian politics, historians must make a clean break with Marxist assumptions that have—explicitly or implicitly—shaped many of the most influential interpretations of this era. Of course, the days when scholars in Hungary wrote dismissively of “Horthy-fascism” are long gone. But Lorman finds that a lingering bias toward ideological explanations continues to obscure the operations of politics itself—the “complex dynamics that shaped the policies of particular politicians, parties, and political systems” (xiii). How exactly did István Bethlen manage to construct so stable a regime amid the wreckage of post-Habsburg, post-revolutionary Hungary? In answering this question, Lorman gives us the fullest account we have of parliamentary party politics in 1920s Hungary.

In Counter-Revolutionary Hungary, Lorman recounts how Bethlen, a politician known before 1914 primarily for his activism on behalf of ethnic Hungarian landholders in Transylvania, emerged as the leading figure in Hungarian political life after 1919 and as the architect of the Unified Party, the party of government in Hungary from the 1920s until 1944. According to Lorman, Bethlen was no ideologue, nor did he have a grand vision for the modernization of Hungarian society. Instead, Bethlen understood policy as a political tool for cajoling, coaxing, or coercing wayward factions into a big political tent. All the important policy issues of the day appear in Lorman's book, such as the question of agrarian reform, the constitutional question of the king, the future of the Social Democratic Party, and the democratization of the government, among others. But the debates around any of these issues are not central to Lorman's analysis. Instead, this book chronicles Bethlen's one true ambition: the reconstruction of a broad-based party of government similar to the political machine put together in the Dualist Era by father and son prime ministers, Kálmán and István Tisza. Only a cohesive governing party, one that stood no chance of electoral defeat, could guarantee the political stability that Hungary so sorely needed to present both internally and abroad. Using important collections of personal and ministerial papers, as well as a broad range of press sources, Lorman recounts how Bethlen used “policy as a political tactic” (the title of his concluding chapter) to pressure opponents or simply to run rings around those less clear in their purpose than he. Lorman's discussion of Bethlen's strategems against the hapless Social Democrats makes for fascinating reading. But Bethlen also directed his centrist instinct for coalition building against the radical right, peeling off many so-called “race defenders” from any nascent opposition so successfully that, in the end, only Gyula Gömbös, Tibor Eckhardt, and a handful of other MPs left the party to go into opposition. Lorman concludes that Bethlen succeeded at the goal he set for himself. Everything turned on his sense of what was needed “to create and maintain the new governing party upon which the government's authority, political stability, and the consolidation of the counter-revolutionary regime depended” (231).

Reading this book in a U.S. election year, as this reviewer did, is to be reminded of the fundamental importance of intraparty coalition building, deal brokering, spin control, and the ambiguous press statement that leaves all options open. These were the things at which Bethlen excelled, and specialists in Hungarian history will be grateful to Lorman for reconstructing their operation in this national context. Throughout the book, Lorman also makes important interpretive points that depart from accepted historiographical wisdom about this period. So, for example, we learn that Bethlen's Unified Party, with its pragmatic approach to national unity, may have been more genuinely popular among the Hungarian electorate than many historians have previously assumed. Lorman's analysis of the political cut-and-thrust between Bethlen and the right radicals is also instructive, adding complexity to a contest too often described in schematic terms.

And yet Lorman's approach to ideology is curious. In his conclusion, he reviews the profoundly anti-democratic features of Bethlen's regime. Hungary's prime minister retained an anachronistic constitutional and legal framework; the civil administration remained “excessively centralized”; and the governing party “reinforced its dominance by interlinking itself with the administration” (223–25). Moreover, Bethlen's belief that policy could always be reshaped to fit the momentary needs of his coalition meant that, in the long run, much needed political and social reforms were “flawed, fudged, or most frequently never enacted” (232). Certainly, Bethlen was no radical, certainly not a radical anti-Semite or a radical reactionary. And yet this approach to policy nevertheless contained within it an ideological vision; ideology and political practice are always inseparable.

The very project of building a party of government immune to popular pressures from the left or the right is itself a deeply ideological commitment. Nor does one need to be a Marxist to note that Bethlen's preference for deal brokering between established political factions rather than grassroots mobilization ensured that politics remained, by and large, the province of men from a certain kind of social and cultural milieu. Perhaps if Lorman had allowed his actors to speak at greater length, the social and cultural politics behind their visions of Hungary's “reconstruction” and “consolidation” would have emerged with greater clarity. Despite this conceptual shortcoming, however, Lorman's book will remain an invaluable guide to the byzantine world of Hungarian party politics in the 1920s and a necessary point of reference for any future interpretations of counterrevolutionary Hungary.