Péter Krekó: Fierce Critic of Viktor Orbán

(Attila/24.hu)

Dr. Péter Krekó is an economist, political scientist, European public intellectual, professor, the executive director of the Budapest-based independent think tank Political Capital, and a fierce critic of Viktor Orbán and his administration.

The way Péter and I met was fascinating. In 2021, I had a meeting with a senior Hungarian government official. The official told me that he wanted me to decide for myself what to think of the government. Consequently, he offered to introduce me to the government’s fiercest critics. I did not believe him. I was convinced he was bullshitting me. Just imagine an American politician making such a hollow overture. But lo and behold, the official introduced me to several of Orbán’s staunchest critics. Péter Krekó was one of them. Over the years that I’ve been coming to Hungary, we’ve become friends. That’s the background for this conversation.

My conversation with Peter Boghossian – Péter Krekó

I still remember my first meeting with Peter Boghossian. It was right after I had received my third COVID vaccination—if memory serves, in 2021.

I already knew his name well from his work on pseudoscience—most famously the “conceptual penis” hoax, which exposed how ideological bias and lack of rigor can sometimes pass for scholarship. As a social scientist with a strong positivist leaning, I’ve always been fascinated by the boundary between science and pseudoscience. While I don’t believe that humanities- neither social sciences, and especially not philosophy—should become mirror images of the natural sciences, I am convinced that any robust claims about how humans think, feel, and behave need to be evidence based these days. Good theories should not just sound clever—they should be able to be tested, and must be tested empirically – with passing at least some of these tests.

This is why I have long been intrigued by “intellectual hoaxes” as a way of stress-testing social sciences. Years earlier, I had the honor of interviewing Alan Sokal, the physicist and mathematician who pulled off a similar sting in the 1990s. So when I heard that Peter Boghossian was coming to Budapest, I was genuinely excited. Also, I’m grateful to MCC for helping us get in touch.

Over the past few years, we’ve met in Budapest four or five times, and as Peter himself noted, we’ve become friends. What I value most in talking with him is his genuine curiosity—his desire to understand, rather than to rush into quick judgments or forced opinions. We don’t see eye-to-eye on every issue, but on the essentials we share much common ground: a deep commitment to liberty, freedom of thought, and the importance of open debate. As I’ve written before, tribalism is one of the most corrosive forces of our age. I admire Peter’s principled resistance to it—something all too rare in today’s public discourse.

We recorded our conversation in early summer in Budapest. I had to juggle family duties—children were next door in the studio building while we were recording the podcast — but in the end they also got to meet him, which I count as a bonus. If the interview appears only now, the delay is entirely on me. Summer holidays and the September rush meant it took me weeks to get this short post written.

As for the substance of our exchange—I won’t spoil it here. Listen, read, and judge for yourself. We covered a wide range of themes.