New Theoretical Framework in the Analysis of Socialist Education Sciences The Political Religion

Abstract

In the current Hungarian historiographic research related to describing education sciences in the Rákosi and Kádár era, new methodological reconsiderations have been undertaken: one of these is political religion. The paper explores the theoretical background and the limitations of this framework, applied mostly in the cases of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. From the concepts of hidden religion, quasi-religious genres and images, secularization, and modernization process the focus has shifted to a new set of characteristics in the analysis of socialist education; namely the symbols, languages and discursive forms of transformed, politicized religious beliefs during the 50’s and afterwards. The characteristics of religion and ideology are comparable if we take their goals, community activities, ceremonial elements, liturgies, temporal views, etc. into consideration, which proves both the universal and the specific nature of political religion. For a future discourse analysis, we set up a table of categories, including the main topics of identity, social connections and the knowledge/belief system. In this framework, we can study, from a different aspect, the socialist celebrations, figures, worldviews, representations, etc., that affected the ideas of the past, the present and the future of socialist education sciences in Hungary.