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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Futures Studies in the European Ex-socialist Countries FUTURES STUDIES IN HUNGARY Erzsébet Nováky The beginnings and organisational/institutional background of futures studies in Hungary Taking an interest in the future and beginning to study it in a systematic and scientific way, including university-level tuition too, date back to the mid and late 1960s in Hungary.

It was then that a scientific approach to and the study of the future emerged at several institutions, motivated primarily by a reaction to the development of the sciences in the international field. Coinciding in time with the founding of the Club of Rome, in 1968 University Professor Géza Kovács , at the time head of the National Planning Department of the (then called Karl Marx) University of Economic Sciences, introduced a new seminar specialising in futures research.

This type of research seminar was a novelty in a number of ways at the university, partly because futures research itself was a new branch of science and partly because of the special organic unity between research and teaching. This research seminar exerted a particularly strong influence encouraging through the undergraduates too the introduction and development of futures research at further places of research and other universities.

This is the reason why Hungarian futures researchers and foreign futures studies centres alike regard the research group headed at the time by Professor Géza Kovács as the cradle of futures research in Hungary.

Work at the National Planning Department of the University of Economic Sciences was characterised by a future vision-oriented, long-range, complex and integrative approach, by a striving to renew theoretical and methodological issues of futures research, and by a future-oriented handling of questions related to the challenges of a given period in time within the complex whole.

All this played an important part in establishing the research group as a place that created and maintained a school of thought. The research team of the Department of Statistics headed by Lajos Besenyei dealt with the statistics-oriented prognostic aspects of futures research as well as making practical, short-range forecasts.

The futures studies group at the Department of Philosophy of the Budapest Technical University , headed by Judit Fodor , delved into the philosophical and epistemological issues of futures research and investigated the future of man and education.