The strange death of ‘civil society’ in post‐communist Hungary

In many respects the failure to develop and strengthen civil initiatives and popular participation, together with the failure to create an active and independent civil society, represents a new, post‐communist ‘betrayal by the intellectuals’. The latter have not openly rejected the concept of ‘civil society’, but they have sought to appropriate it, redefining it to refer to their own activities and associations, and thus monopolizing its use to legitimize their own behaviour.