Book review essay

J.F. Dorahy's The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism (2019) offers contemporary readers a conscientious assessment of the intellectual initiatives of Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Markus, and Ferenc Feher, both in the years immediately following their apprenticeship with Gyorgy Lukics, and later, through their independent philosophical endeavours. Dorahy's book also pinpoints the Budapest thinkers' proposal for a radical democratic reckoning, and begins to suggest how that proposal might today bear on global practice and globally-minded theories. The book is an excellent introduction to the ideas of Heller and Markus. But through them, it is also a striking and thoroughly relevant consideration of the possibilities for an ethics of planetary commitment, and for a critical theory fixed upon incorporating the vigorous rootstock of radical democracy with a multidimensional, pluralistic social order.