Communication

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ARTICLES

To the Editors:
An omission occurred in my article "Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905" (AHR, April 2006, 333), which I caught after the article was in print, and for which I am responsible. Footnote 105 should read as follows:
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Boston, 1907), 113. In Pragmatism and Political Economy, 158–224, James Livingston first demonstrated that the original pragmatists grasped the epistemological possibilities residing in the radical contingency of the credit economy—"the future tense of money"—created by corporate capitalism. The foundational work of scholarship linking the thought of James and Holmes is still Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949), which argues that the two shared a "revolt against formalism." See also Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York, 1994), 454–463, and Menand, Metaphysical Club, 409–433. Others have commented on the triumph of probability and its ideological consequences in this period. See Hacking, The Taming of Chance, which focuses on another American pragmatist, Charles Peirce; and Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York, 2003), 187–227, which posits an incomplete victory for a culture of corporate control over a William Jamesian culture of chance.
Jon Levy

REVIEWS

To the Editors:
Michael A. Genovese, reviewing Robert Mason's book on Richard Nixon (AHR, February 2006, 234), says that the difficulties of LBJ led to this: "Republicans, for the first time in thirty years, entertained the possibility they might become the majority party in America." After the Republicans won both the House and Senate in 1946, they expected to win the presidency in 1948. Most political commentators agreed. Harry S Truman eliminated that hope, but the possibility existed less than thirty years before the period discussed.
Bernard Sinsheimer Boulogne, France

Michael A. Genovese does not wish to respond.
To the editors:
A reviewer is expected to present the main theme(s) and argument of the book being reviewed, and introduce the author. In reviewing my Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siécle Budapest (AHR, June 2006, 926). Steven Beller failed to do this. He nonetheless informs the reader that the author "does not succeed very well at achieving ... [his] goals."
While the book does, as Beller indicates, examine "such topics as Budapest's parks, cafés, bridges, department stores, and panoramas," those were the sites of inquiry, not the point of the work, which examined various ways of perceiving and using public places and institutions in the metropolis.
Beller complains that the book relies on Hungarian scholarship and that other "Central European perspectives that would have been of great interest are largely missing." Alas, one wishes that more such works had been published in the 1990s and thus were available to me. Yet he also admits that "Gyáni does cite many international authors." What is the problem? Too few? The wrong ones?
Of the books he mentions, apart from Lukacs's essay (not very scholarly), Congdon's and Gluck's are neither urban nor social history. Alice Freifeld produced her monograph after the Hungarian edition of mine was published—and she even cited it.
He claims that three "international" (!) authors are "especially" cited. In fact, there were eighty-seven, including many British, American (Beller also included), and several French, German, Swedish, and Austrian scholars. That is when someone concentrates "on works in one's own language." Why is Pierre Bourdieu not cited? Why, other than his current popularity, should he be? Other theorists seem more pertinent to the questions being asked. Beller says that the book gives "much less than it ought" because "Where there is interesting empirical thesis, theory is shortchanged; where there is an interesting thesis, the evidence is kept from us." The only example mentioned concerns "the peculiarities of Budapest's language(s)." Beller regrets that "when Gyáni's study [on that point] gets quite interesting theoretically ... , he cuts off his discussion without giving much in the way of example." The only thing that is not indicated here is that "The examples mentioned cannot be reproduced here for these are untranslatable idioms" (Identity, 195).
That Beller's own work has dealt extensively with Central European Jews, particularly in Vienna, probably accounts for his extensive discussion of my very limited treatment of Jews. But why are interconfessional marriage and divorce law liberalization "dubious evidence" of assimilation? International social science specialists take such indicators seriously. Beller seems most upset by my argument about the significance of non-Jewish contributions to Budapest modernism, doubtless because it undercuts his own thesis that the "Central European modern culture was predominantly a product of the educated elite of the region's Jewish bourgeoisie, and dependent on the cultural and historical experience of the group" (Austrian History Yearbook, 1992, 77). Not exclusively Lajos Fülep, the alienated aesthete, but a major part of the Budapest poets, novelists, painters, composers, and other creative artists who had a prominent role in cultural modernism of the day were to represent the non-Jewish middle classes. And, contrary to Beller's suggestion, this was also discussed in the book through several notable examples (Endre Ady, Dezsõ Kosztolányi, Mihály Babits, Béla BartóAaok, Zoltán Kodály, and the painters of the Eight). All of them had the decisive experience of perceiving social impermanence as a fact of life, which was closely bound up with a severe identity crisis. This, however, was not the sole privilege of "a very particular group of 'Central Europeans,' the Jewish bourgeoisie," who thus must be given "a central place in that explanation" (Austrian History Yearbook, 1992, 77 and 79).
Beller says that my book is "sketchy" and "cannot ... be trusted much in its conclusions." I suggest, however, that it is Beller's careless and sketchy review that ought not to be trusted.
Gábor Gyáni

Steven Beller responds:
Professor Gyáni claims that I do not tell the reader what the book is about. In the first paragraph of my review, I lay out the book's main themes—the international context, the public and private sides of Budapestian urban experience—and also indicate how Gyáni wants to tie this in to Budapest's cultural modernism. I think this an accurate summary.
Especially relevant is Gyáni's intent to derive explanations and characterizations of Budapest's cultural modernism from the social historical context constructed by him. That is why I find Gyáni's dismissal of Congdon and Gluck's work as "neither urban nor social history" perplexing, for surely any claims about the nature of Budapest's cultural modernism would also need to refer to the cultural and intellectual history treated by Congdon and Gluck? I also find the offhand dismissal of Bourdieu odd considering the topic, but that would not matter if Gyáni's argument were more compelling.
I happily accept Gyáni's claim that he cited eighty-seven "international authors" in his book. Yet I see no reason to alter my view that Gyáni's view of Budapest remains remarkably "Hungarian," typically wishing to see Budapest in a Western perspective rather than a Central European one. The "Central European perspectives" I found lacking referred to the large international literature that had, by the 1990s, accumulated about other Central European cities at the turn of the century, most notably Vienna 1900. Had Gyáni devoted more time to that literature, he might have had a more nuanced sense of the shared Central European modern culture of the turn of the century, and more understanding of the central, "predominant" (but neither "sole" nor exclusive) role that Jews played in that shared inter-urban culture.
There clearly is disagreement between us on the Jewish aspect to Budapest 1900. On Gyáni's characterization of the effects of changes to the marriage laws in the 1890s, for example, it is not the evidence that I find "dubious" but rather his treatment of that evidence. Gyáni's conclusion concerning the relatively high divorce rates among Jews after this liberalization is that "For the Jews it meant that at long last they could break out of the religious-ethnic ghetto and via a mixed marriage take a giant step toward complete absorption and assimilation" (170). It is this assertion that I characterized as "reductive social history," for it ascribes to individuals one holistic motive when many (individual) motives were possible, and then extrapolates from a small set of cases to implicate the whole group of "the Jews" of Budapest. I do not dispute that assimilation was a goal of many and acculturation a fact, but I cannot see why divorce and remarriage was anything more for many Jewish individuals than an exercising of their newfound freedom to marry whom they wished.
Nor would I dispute that many non-Jews were involved in Hungarian cultural modernism, as indeed were many non-Jews in the cultural modernism of Vienna and other Central European cities. Yet beside Gyáni's impressive list of non-Jewish Magyar cultural modernists, I would offer another list of Hungarian Jewish contributors to Central European modern culture, which would include Lukács, Molnár, the Polanyis, Hatvany, Mannheim, Hauser, Jaszi, Fenyó, Ferenczi, Herzl, Nordau, et al. I would like to see addressed the ethnic patterns and developments behind such lists, especially which groups provided the crucial financial and social support for the culture. Gyáni sees Budapest's ethnic multiplicity concerning mass culture, but this multiethnic perspective fades away when we consider Budapest's specific contribution to cultural modernism in favor of a general "identity crisis." One needs to go to another Hungarian social historian, Victor Karady (not cited by Gyáni), to find out that roughly 70 percent of Hungary's educated class around 1900 was not Magyar by descent, and that Jews were 25 percent of the national educated class, with presumably a much higher concentration in Budapest, where Jews were a quarter of the population. The detailed history of Budapest Jewry's contribution to Hungarian and Central European modern culture still needs to be written. Using Lajos Fülep rhetorically to prove that "modernism" was not exclusively Jewish simply serves to obscure and distract from the, indeed, central cultural role of Jews in Budapest 1900.
Steven Beller Washington, D.C.

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