The rebirth of comparative law in socialist Hungary

Abstract

The Comparative Law Department, established in 1963 at the Institute of Political and Legal Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, initiated the movement of comparativism, which slowly spread throughout the country, initially by collecting foreign legal sources relating to a given area of regulation and publishing them in Hungarian. Initially, it rejected comparisons between the laws of „bourgeois" and “socialist” regimes as different types of law, but then began to make comparisons between the laws of identical socio-economic formations as “internal” and those between different formations as “external”. On the one hand, this reinforced the Marxist view of law as a superstructure component as determined by the socio-economic base, and on the other hand, it emphasized the importance of the technical component of law and its essential worldwide community, which, unlike the former dependency, as capable of demonstrating relative independence. With all this, Academician Director Imre Szabó freed socialist jurisprudence from its Cold War isolation under the banner of comparatio iuris, and, although in a contradictory direction, elevated it to a partner of the West that now demanded equality. In contrast to the legal systems that emerged as early Bolshevism, later fascism, and then National Socialism, which were unable to make recognized either their relatively separate status or their specific characteristics between the two world wars, now so-called socialist law has become a sui generis challenger, even a direct competitor, to so-called bourgeois law. Behind it, legal scholarship, now in cooperation with the West in a kind of academic community, at least in its Hungarian, Polish, and Serbian versions, and to some extent in its Czech variant, has been able to develop the elaboration of its own characteristics into theoretical significance.