Mission statement

The mission of the Research Institute is to pursue research into political theory and the theory of government within the disciplinary frameworks of government studies and political philosophy. Its main output is publishing in the disciplines’ significant national and international forums, but it will also organise conferences at home and abroad, in order to get integrated into the leading national and international research networks of the aforementioned sciences. The Institute takes responsibility for cultivating Hungarian language scholarship, but it is also eager to participate in international cooperation, in the best traditions of Hungarian academia. Its primary aim is high-standard theoretical work, excluding partisanship or party political engagement, but with the intention of returning direct educational benefits to the alma mater and also of serving the general public in well-established as well as novel forms.
The Institute’s research activities feed upon the principles and research methods of the European tradition of the humanities, but they also apply the discursive strategies of the modern social sciences and the insights of the empirical research palette. It recruits its research staff from among the practitioners of philosophy, political science, the history of literature and of political thought, as well as of the theoretical branches of the social sciences.
Thematically, its research potential targets the Hungarian political tradition, and offers fresh interpretations of contemporary national and international politics, paying special attention to the Central European region as well as the Euro-Atlantic civilisation in general. It also contributes to the most promising Hungarian research areas within the humanities and the social sciences, relying on the achievements, both well-known and undiscovered, of the country’s intellectual elite, in order to improve the nation’s international competitiveness in the human sciences.