Sándor Giesswein's program in the light of contemporary ideological developments

Sándor Giesswein with his distinctly modern thinking and democratic commitment may be distinguished as an “outlier” political and ecclesiastical thinker at the turn of the 20^th century. He operated at a distance from both conservative church circles and the Christian course of the Horthy system. He firmly believed that “the isolated individual is as little a reality as the abstract concept of humanity”, and he consistently struggled not only with the historical materialism and anti-ecclesiasticism of the socialist ideologies appearing in Hungary, but also with the liberal free-market concept and the far-reaching set of problems - which in Hungary included the problem of unresolved land issues, and the failure to address the evolution of the industrial proletariat. He states that "materialistic individualism cannot have any other consequence than materialistic socialism", which he considered harmful to Hungarian social development. The paper summarizes Sándor Giesswein’s book titled Social Problems and Christian Worldview. By summarizing the book, the study intends to present the political theological canon of a neglected political thinker.