Empórium és impérium. Nacionalizmus az üzleti életben – Lánczy Leó

Leó Lánczy was the CEO of the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest, the largest Hungarian bank at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was an age when social Darwinism, coupled with an organic concept of society, provided a suitable terrain for connecting liberalism and nationalism. The banker viewed the matter of the nation as the issue of the central bank and financial markets. In the case of the former, Lánczy could not subscribe to the views of political nationalists. He dispensed his counsel much like a doctor advises prevention before cure, e.g. “should we decide on an independent central bank, we must be aware of such and such possible problem”. He did, however, wholeheartedly embrace the idea of south-eastern expansion. In this question he shared the ideology of Béni Kállay, a politician who presented his unique mixture of liberalism and imperialism as the preservation of the middle classes – or rather racial preservation, as it would be seen today.