A “Deák School of History”

This article argues that—fully unintentionally—István Deák founded a distinctive school of history among the students he mentored. The school took inspiration from Deák’s captivating style, clear argumentation, and empathetic moral capacity. In particular, however, Deák and his students sought explanations for social, cultural, and political phenomena in East Central Europe outside the constricting boundaries of the nationalism that dominated this field of history. Before Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner revived constructivist theories of the nation from very different perspectives in the 1980s, Deák’s wary approach to nationalism and the Habsburg monarchy would become a key element that defined the school of historians that grew up around him. In doing so he and they radically reshaped our understanding of the region and its history.