Gábor Gángó, scientific advisor of the Institute of Philosophy, delivered a lecture titled For the Soviet Bloc better than Hannah Arendt? Ágnes Heller’s theory of totalitarianism on 28 January, 2025 in Erfurt.

The lecture offered a presentation of Ágnes Heller’s theory of totalitarianism developed in her (with Ferenc Fehér and György Márkus co-authored) 1983 book Dictatorship Over Needs; a theory aiming to overcome Hannah Arendt’s position. Next, it addressed the question of to what extent the adoption of the theory to the 1989 political changes in Eastern Europe, above all her call for dismantling East European “totalitarianisms” by a thoroughgoing replacement of the elites, can be considered as a philosophical courier of the authoritarian shifts that occurred in the region decades later. As scholarship on the Budapest School rests upon the axiom that the activities of its members can primarily be understood as a philosophy against totalitarianism, the conclusion of the lecture urged a critical reconsideration of the School’s self-thematised narratives.