Iván Szelényi

Iván Szelényi was born in Budapest on 17 April 1938, the son of Gusztáv Szelényi, an entomologist, and Julianna Csapó. He studied at the external trade faculty of the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, now Corvinus University, and graduated in 1960.

After graduating he worked at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. A Ford Foundation scholarship then took him to the University of California, Berkeley for a year.

On his return to Hungary Szelényi became a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was made its scientific secretary in 1967 and head of the department of regional sociology in 1970, and in 1973 he earned the Candidate of Sciences degree, the Hungarian equivalent of a doctorate, with a dissertation on urban inequalities under state socialism. His early research focused on urban communities and settlement sociology, and he published widely on the subject, mostly in Hungarian.

With his friend the novelist György Konrád he wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, which argued that the intelligentsia was becoming a ruling class under state socialism. In 1974 he was arrested after the manuscript was smuggled abroad, and in 1975 he was expelled from Hungary and stripped of his citizenship. The book appeared in English in 1979 and was translated into German, French, Spanish and Japanese.

In exile he was a visiting research professor at the University of Kent in 1975 before becoming Foundation Professor of Sociology at Flinders University in Adelaide, where he chaired the department until 1980. He moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981, finishing there as the Karl Polanyi Professor, and then became Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. From 1988 to 1999 he was professor of sociology at UCLA, chairing the department from 1992 to 1995. His doctoral students there included the sociologists Bruce Western, Lawrence King and Katherine Beckett.

In 1999 he was appointed William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology and Professor of Political Science at Yale, chairing the department twice. In 2010 he became the founding dean of social sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he continued to teach. He also led the Hungarian Sociological Association and served as a vice president of the American Sociological Association. His major books included Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (1983), Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (1988), Making Capitalism without Capitalists (1998, with Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley), Patterns of Exclusion (2006, with János Ladányi) and Varieties of Post-communist Capitalism (2019, with Péter Mihályi).

Szelényi was married to Katalin Szelényi from 1960 until her death in 1999. He married Vanilia Majoros in 2003; they divorced in 2015. He had three children, Szonja, Lilla and Balázs.

After the change of system in Hungary his citizenship was restored, and in the final period of his life he returned to live there. He was a board member of the TÁRKI Social Research Institute. Speaking on Klubrádió in 2023, on the 90th anniversary of Konrád's birth, he remembered his co author and close friend and spoke in favour of the right to decide on the end of one's own life.

Iván Szelényi died on 3 August 2026, in the 88th year of his life, after a long illness. His death was announced by the TÁRKI Social Research Institute, whose obituary said it was proud to have had him among its circle in the closing period of his life after his return home. His death was reported by Hungarian outlets including 24.hu and Telex. No more specific cause of death was made public.

Szelényi was an internationally recognised researcher of urban and settlement sociology, social inequality and the structural problems of both capitalism and socialism. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power was translated into several languages and remains widely cited on class under communism, and his later work on the making of capitalism in Eastern Europe after 1989 shaped how scholars understood the post communist transition.

His honours included full membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1995), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the Széchenyi Prize (2006), Hungary's highest state award for scholarship, honorary citizenship of Budapest (2008) and five honorary doctorates. In a 2016 interview with 24.hu he described the intellectual role he found most appealing as offering an alternative.