Tibor Scitovsky, a Hungarian-born eco-nomist, who rose to prominence in the United States, has published an absorbing memoir. The reader is presented with a truly candid, accurate and critical self-portrait by this affable, highly talented and extremely modest man, a man of ideas and moral principle—and much more. For this is also a broad survey of changing times from the early days of the century up to the present, telling us much about the Hungarian aristocracy, student life in Paris, London and Cambridge before the war, and army life and academic life in the United States.

On the male side Tibor Scitovsky traces his ancestry to a teacher in a poor Slovak village in the old Upper Hungary (today Slovakia), one of whose sons rose to become Archbishop of Esztergom in 1849 and thus Prince Primate of Hungary. Ennobled by the Emperor, he became a wealthy aristocrat who built numerous schools and churches, including the Esztergom Basilica. It was for the opening ceremony of the latter cathedral that he commissioned Franz Liszt to compose the Missa Solennis of Esztergom. He gave generously to the poor, became a major patron of culture, and financially supported the foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The Prince Primate entrusted the management of his estates to his favourite nephew, Tibor Scitovsky’s great-grand-father, who eventually inherited the lands and the high offices in county administration which went with them. But as the estate of some 6,000 acres, given obsolete production methods, failed to provide the descendants with a decent middle-class standard of living, and since they were not entrepreneurs, they sought employment in the civil service, as was customary for the gentry in those times.

Nevertheless, the property remained theirs right up to the end of the First World War, and so the author, in the company of various uncles, aunts and cousins, spent all his summers in Nőtincs. The description of these vacations provides perhaps the most colourful part of the book. It is hard to imagine now how the well off extended family of the Scitovskys, an early-twentieth-century Hungarian version of Chekov’s world, could spend blissfully happy holidays in a mansion approximately sixty kilometres from Budapest, inapproachable by train, where there was no telephone, no electricity, no water mains, no drainage, no shops. The children had a fortnightly bath in a wooden tub set up in the garden, but the adults very likely went without one while there. The household was taken care of by a huge number of servants, in return for food and occasionally cast-off clothes, but no wages. The children, of course, enjoyed their escape from city life and, even more importantly, from being locked up in school, they were free to wander about, to watch the feeding of the animals, the milking, the harvest and the thrashing, but the adults spent their time in idleness, they neither shot nor rode, nor went for walks, neither did they read or make music. Scitovsky writes of these vacations:

Every time I see a Chekhov play, it makes me think of those summers, because they depict that atmosphere of lazy boredom where people are too bored to enjoy their laziness and too lazy to rouse themselves to do something enjoyable.

This early experience of such concentrated boredom left a deep impression on him, that is why it played such an important part in his theoretical writings, in which he traced the origins of aggression and violence back to boredom.

Scitovsky is fully aware of the influence his parents had on his development. He gives a vivid account of this. His father was an Undersecretary in the Ministry of Commerce, and also one of the economic advisors to the Hungarian delegation attending the Trianon Peace Treaty, before he became, in 1922, the CEO of one of the largest Hungarian banks, the Hitelbank. For a short time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs, then he went back to the bank, but this time as President, on which his son comments, "I am still amazed by the abrupt rise in our affluence". Scitovsky admired and respected his father, especially for his "generosity, compassion, correctness and polite behaviour towards everybody..." This made him different from the ruling gentry with their "insolent swagger" and "uncivil behaviour". To this he adds the following:

I disliked that insolent swagger, adopted in some measure by all civil servants down to ordinary policemen; and my resentment of their uncivil, masterful behavior, which belied their very name, may have been the origin of my lifelong leftist sympathies.

On reading this, we cannot help feeling how little public servants have changed: revolutions, counter-revolutions, fascist Arrow-Cross rule or Soviet-type dictatorship, Christian-conservative, social-liberal or bourgeois right of centre regimes have been unable to change the arrogance and overbearing attitude of public servants.

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