‘I am a Radical, so I went up to the Wall’: Miklós Gáspár Tamás (1948–2023)

In the middle of January, Hungary lost a brilliant thinker. Miklós Gáspár Tamás is remembered as a defining figure of the dissident scene at the time of ‘real socialism’ in the 1980s, one of the founder members of the underground journal Beszélő/Speaker and the Party of Free Democratic Alliance, and an architect of the 1989/90 transformation. Tamás was more of an essayist, and he did not create a system of thought. In his own words in Farewell to the Right?1 (1994): ‘the rejection of intellectual and political consequences of revolutionary utopia made my generation psychologically impotent to create the grand theory, the great system’.