The Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” was established in 2010 by PhD students and young post-doctoral researchers in order to analyze contemporary Hungarian society from a critical leftist perspective. Its members felt that questions of politics and the economy were treated almost separately in Hungarian discourses, while there was an increasing need to understand them as interconnected. Members of Helyzet formulated a critical stance towards social, political and economic analysis in contemporary Hungary, stating that it was limited by the master narrative of transition to an idealized Western European modernity, a narrative that transformed local complexities into exoticisms, and viewed local-global relationships through a primitive linear model of development. The working group observes contemporary Hungary as part and parcel of contemporary European and global power relations. The aim of Helyzet is to connect existing knowledge on global and supranational relationships with local knowledge gathered from the broader sphere of sociology.