Abstract

The study is based on empirical findings of a large prosopographical database of those whom special scholarly titles of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences («academic candidate» and «academic doctor») have been awarded in the years 1950-2003 in the field of the social sciences and the humanities. These graduates represent till the present the main academic élite in the given disciplines, as the pool of section of the teaching staff of higher education and the personnel of specialized research institutions (belonging mostly to the Academy of Sciences itself). Our study provides a statistical «morphology» of sorts of this «state nobility» (using Bourdieu's expression) broken down in various combinations by disciplines, historical generations, gender and age of graduation.