Beyond Alienation: Legal Consciousness and Legal Experience in Hungary

Legal alienation is currently a key theoretical concept to understand how the law works – or fail – in everyday use. (Hertogh 2018) Moreover, from a broader perspective, this concept also can help us to analyze the structural problems in our modern democracies. It also prompt us to consider what happens in a society where there has almost certainly never been a basic trust in the law. Thus, the people, in general, have never been able to alienate from it. (Fleck 2017)

Our research aims to understand how the family history, family experiences and the memory of these influence individual’s attitude and trust toward the law. Based on our preliminary result, we have found that there is a fundamental distrust in the law in Hungary. It may be said that legal alienation is the norm rather than the exception. Additionally, this situation is deeply rooted in the family histories as nearly every family has experiences in which the law – or most certainly the legal and political system – caused harm, caused trauma.

In my presentation, I will explore a possible connection between the legal alienation and the historical experiences according to narrative family and life history interviews, and a representative survey.