This book by the Director of the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is a collection of twelve essays, all of which with the exception of the first one were presented at various international congresses or symposia, and the majority of which have already appeared in print. Collectively these essay deal with the "social classes, strata and occupation groups of the Hungarian people" within the Carpathian Basin, and area that for the better part of a millennium used to constitute Historic Hungary.

Having been a multinational state through much of its existence, Hungary had been the homeland of close to a dozen different nationalities, each with its own folk traditions and way of life. Some of these ethnic groups were highly urbanized (like the Germans, the Jews, and many of the Hungarians), while most of the others were on various levels of rural and pastoral existence. They each had their own social elites. But by virtue of being part of the Hungarian state, the latter generally became members of the Hungarian nobility and the Hungarian honoratior class, and then gradually assimilated into the Hungarian nation. Paladi-Kovacs docs touches upon the society and culture of most of these ethnic groups, but his essays deal primarily with the Hungarians or the Magyars, who constituted the state-forming nation and the leading nationality of Historic Hungary.