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It is here that we present our theory of transitions to capitalism as an extension of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, posing it against the antinomies of neoclassical economic theories and path-dependence explanations of social change in contem porary Central Europe. D ifferent types o f capital Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the forms o f‘capital’1 is helpful for thinking about the connections between changing social structure and the strategies and choices of agents in Central Europe. While we rely on Weber’s distinc­ tion between rank and class,2 we also suggest that some of the changes in Central Europe have been more complex than a two-dimensional metaphor can convey.

20 MAKING CAPITALISM W ITHOU T CAPITALISTS surface, but in the deeper layers of individual and collective experience, silence - continuity - reigns. So, indeed, plus ga change, plus c’esl la meme chosel As the impressionistic account above conveys, what has remained constant in Central Europe is an enduring preoccupation with social origins in the face of massive social change. In particular, the categorical division between the politically correct and the politically suspect continues to inform the way agents perceive and classify the social world.

One could become a director or a full professor without joining the party, and the proportion of well-qualified professionals increased even among political cadres. O ther countries varied in their similarity to the H ungarian model. Poland - and to some extent Yugoslavia - were closest to the Hungarian model, and Romania and Russia were the most different. During the first years of the rule of Gierek, in the 1970s, the Polish system approached the H ungarian model most closely. This was the time when the technocratic intelligentsia was co-opted most successfully by the ideology of the ‘second Poland’, or the ‘second industrialization of Poland’.