Dissolution of Communist Power

Agnes Horvath is a political anthropologist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, and president of the International Political Anthropology Association, she was an affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma (2013), Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded (2021), Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality (2024), and Gnostic Fools: The Occult Origins of Our Ideological Age (2026); the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary (1992), Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (2018), and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology (2020); and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (2015), Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations (2019), Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion (2019), Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery (2020), and Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism (2022).Arpad Szakolczai is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland, and is now Senior Fellow at the St. Gallen Collegium of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (2025-26). Born and educated in Hungary, has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (1987), taught social theory at the European University Institute (1990-98), and was ERC panel member (SH5, 2011-8). His recent books include Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena (2013), Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary (2016), Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017), Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (with Agnes Horvath, Routledge, 2018), From Anthropology to Social Theory (with Bjørn Thomassen, Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology (with Agnes Horvath, Routledge, 2020), Il gioco permanente con i limiti: La pandemia, il malinteso dell’universalismo e gli imbrogli della teoria economica (Ensemble, 2021), Post Truth Society: A political anthropology of trickster logic (Routledge, 2022), Political Anthropology as Method (Routledge, 2023), and Elgar Encyclopaedia of Political Anthropology (edited with Paul O’Connor, Edward Elgar, 2025).

• 1.Introduction 2. Michel Foucault and the Study of Power 3. The activity of District Party Committees 4. What is ‘Politics’? 5. The Background and Value System of Party Workers 6. The Tasks of Political Instructors 7. The Specificities of the Instructor’s Work 8. A Governmental Technology Resurrected by the Party: The Early Modern ‘Police’ 9. Conclusion: The Success of a Failure.