A Brief History of Viktor Orbán

“Lendvai believes that we should never underestimate the role that ‘personalities’ play in politics.”

Introduction

Paul Lendvai’s Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman is one of the most interesting and necessary critical biographies published in some time. The book, published by Oxford University Press, chronicles the rise of Hungary’s (in)famous demagogue from humble beginnings to increasingly wielding absolute power over his small central European state. Along the way, Lendvai provides sustained criticisms of the Orbán regime and its increasingly brazen corruption. The book is important not just for chronicling the life of a world leader who has punched well above his weight for almost a decade now. It also describes the radical and authoritarian iteration of what I’ve called post-modern conservatism in action. Chillingly, Lendvai argues that it is very difficult to foresee an end to the increasingly authoritarian Orbán regime. Organized by a cunning leader with few qualms about using state power to crush dissent, Lendvai argues that we may be living with Orbán for some time.

Viktor Orbán’s Rise to Power

Lendvai’s book has a somewhat unusual structure, in bouncing back and forth between personalized details about one man’s life—to analysis of Hungarian politics and policies. Nominally a biography, Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman actually turns its attention to a panoramic swathe of issues. In the hands of a lesser guide, this might result in a lack of focus and a drifting narrative. But it is to Lendvai’s credit that he retains a firm grip on the subject, even when engaging in fascinating and necessary asides.

The book begins with ruminations about the role individuals play in politics. For many commentators—Leo Tolstoy being perhaps the most prominent—history makes the person and not the other way around. However, Lendvai believes that we should never underestimate the role that “personalities” play in politics. Grasping how individual personalities reshape the world around us can help understand why things so often do not go the way we expect—and indeed how seemingly improving situations can sometimes take nosedives for the worst. As Lendvai puts it:

“The maxim that ‘men make history’ originates with the notions of hero worship expressed by the once very popular Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. ‘The history of the world is but a biography of great men.’ According to the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, however, the spirit of the world and of the age is much more decisive than either people or personalities. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that politics is dependent on the material conditions of production. The question of which forces have moves a leading politician and which forces he himself has set into motion—that is, the combination of external factors and personal action—still constitutes the central problem in describing and evaluating political personalities today. If chroniclers of contemporary history wish to consider the important role of the personal element in political decision making, which should never be underestimated, then they need only recall the words of the Swiss historian Herbert Lüthy: ‘Contemporary history is not anonymous…’”