Politikai eszmék és az alkotmány : az alkotmány eszmetörténeti előzményei Kovács István munkásságában

The author analyses how the ideological-historical antecedents of the constitution can be found in the work of István Kovács, on which theoretical works and predecessors he based his publications. Almost all of the professor's writings contain references to the history of ideas – essentially, of course, in proportion to the nature of the constitutional issue under examination. He first systematically presented the history of constitutional ideas in his book The New Elements of Socialist Constitutional Development (1962). It is regrettable that he did not subsequently undertake to write a summary work of similar ambition. However, from the early 1980s onwards, he has been working on the publication of the constitutions of the Soviet Union, the Western European states and the European people's democracies in Hungarian, and on analytical introductions given to the collections. These are timeless works of constitutional history. For István Kovács, the other basic interpretative framework of constitutional thought was the fundamental laws of the feudal state, the contract state conception and the statutes of the Calvinist church. At the same time, he approached public law with a positivist outlook and method, which entailed a very significant impoverishment of the meaning of the history of theories