Prof. Dr. Attila Melegh@60
Dear Attila,
It is my distinct pleasure to celebrate your 60. birthday by these congratulations and to wish you all the best for the next and new period of your life and works. Be your birthday a wonderful opportunity to remember your most important and impressive thoughts so many colleagues could benefit from. I feel very honoured and happy that I have had the chance to get in touch with you and your research group, to be part of the vivid exchange you have organized and inspired over years and to collaborate and discuss with you in different fields of research.
There are a lot of common issues: research on care work in face of demographic change and – as you and your research group coined the term – the “scarcity” of care, the works of Karl Polanyi as a common starting point to understand some tendencies of the past, present and future of capitalist societies, the reflection on the relations of economics and politics, market and state in the liberal and neoliberal era and in times of an authoritarian turn in Europe. You are totally right in your analyses that we – as sociologists – must investigate the past to understand the present and consider the long waves of (neo)liberal marketization to understand the second era of globalization or to get an idea of the significance of the “migration turn” in (Eastern) Europe. And besides your important analyses of the history of (market) capitalism and its contemporary formation, your interest in already existing and future ideas of a non-capitalist mixed economy is most timely in face of the “blind improvement” (Polanyi) we are witnessing not only for decades but for centuries.
A lot to discuss, a lot to do for sociologists and civil society and I am very much looking forward to continuing our collaboration in all these research fields, in Budapest, Linz and Vienna, in running and planned research projects and on conferences and to being part of all the inspiring discurses around the important scientific and political topics you raise.
‘Happy Birthday’ to you and let me conclude in German with a very popular rhyme we can make use of regarding the great thinkers of our times and therefore you: Wie schön, dass Du geboren bist, wir hätten Dich sonst sehr vermisst!
Brigitte