Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics

Book excerpt: In this important new historical study, Mária Kovács examines the struggle between liberal and anti-Semitic policies among professional groups--doctors, lawyers, engineers--in Hungary. Kovács's main emphasis is on the interwar period when unemployment, expansion of the welfare system, and competition for state jobs during the Great Depression, combined with crass anti-Semitism on the part of engineers and medical associations, radically altered previously liberal policies of open entry and equal educational opportunity. Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics analyzes to what extent these new policies were dictated by authoritarian governments from above and to what extent they originated within the professions themselves. The story ends with the Holocaust, which sealed the fate of those professionals who had become victims of persecution under the German occupation of Hungary.