Intellectual professions and the institution of virilism

One of the peculiarities of the Hungarian system of local self-government was the so-called virilism, which was introduced a few years after the Compromise and was in force in most of the country until 1945. The term originally meant the right of personal representation, but in Hungary it expressed the right of the highest taxpayers of local authorities to be members of the representative body. The more or less openly stated aim of the system was to break the internal power of local power elites. Among the high taxpayers, those belonging to the group considered to be intellectual professions would not have constituted a sufficiently large proportion for those who devised the scheme, and so their tax was doubled when the list of those entitled to official representation was drawn up.

The virile lists available allow us to look at the occupational distribution of virile people.

"In any case, the comparison of occupational data allows us to group professions according to more than just the perception of statistics at the time. The proportion of virile and elected officials within the occupations makes it possible to identify typical patterns. Four characteristic types can be identified on the basis of the under- or over-representation of the occupations within each half of the body and the ratio of the degree of representation between the two halves of the body. The largest type in terms of the number of occupations (26 occupations, 60%) is the double under-represented.

Of the remainder, the type of the doubly over-represented stands out, with two sub-types. One includes occupations that are more strongly over-represented in the virilist half of the representative body than in the members ({landowner and large landowner}; {merchant}, {lawyer}), the other those in which the ratio is reversed ({small landowner}; {teacher, schoolmaster}; {priest, monk}). There is one more characteristic type - those occupations which are under-represented in the representative half and over-represented in the virilist ({big industrialist, manufacturer}; {vendor, coffee-seller}; {big merchant}; {physician}; {pharmacist}; {house-keeper}). Apart from the fact that it will be interesting to group towns according to the dominance of types, the classification of occupations by virility is an interesting way of breaking down the often treated group of liberal intellectual professions.

The over- and under-representation referred to in the text refers to the proportion of members of a group (e.g. teachers) in a sub-population (e.g. the board of representatives) compared to the population (e.g. the population of the municipality). If the first proportion is larger than the second, we speak of over-representation, otherwise of under-representation. The patterns presented here only raise questions. For certain asymmetries, a simple explanation is offered, but a general interpretation is still needed."

[The cited excerpt is taken from Károly Halmos: A Besitzbürgertum Magyarországon [The property bourgeoisie in Hungary]. In: Zsombékok. Középosztályok és iskoláztatás Magyarországon a 19. század elejétől a 20. század közepéig. Társadalomtörténeti tanulmányok. Kövér György (ed). Századvég, Budapest 2006. 161-194.]