Dorit Geva

This essay examines Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and his cultivation of a new form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism, which I call ordonationalist. With particular emphasis placed on tracing resurgence of the national state, ordonationalism points to the neoliberal intensifications, but also the ruptures to neoliberalism through post-neoliberal advances, exemplified by the Hungarian state. Ordonationalism combines: (1) a newly empowered nationalist state invested in flexibilizing domestic labour and controlling access to domestic capitalist accumulation; (2) a national state captured by political actors as a means towards controlling access to domestic capital accumulation; (3) a novel regime of social reproduction, linking financialization, flexibilization of labour, steep decline in supporting social reproduction, and supporting consumption as a source of social reproduction. This project is hegemonic. However, the contradictions between radical neoliberalization and radical nationalism generate ever-more instances where an authoritarian state steps in to solve crises generated by its contradictions.

How did the state protect and then subvert men’s household authority when the state was exclusively staffed by men? I answer the above question by critically fusing neo-Weberian scholarship on modern state development with feminist political sociology on gender and the state, and by examining establishment of the French conscription system. When first creating a mass army in the nineteenth century, the French state offered family-based exemptions, balancing between expanding state power and maintenance of men’s household authority. However, intensification of twentieth-century total war led to a decrease in family-based exemptions, and the state’s diminished support of men’s household authority. I thereby identify how the fiscal-military state first supported then diminished men’s household authority through one of the state’s most masculine arms.