It is a kind of intellectual center that is concentrating first of all on renewing and popularizing social criticism in the widest range of the term.
Nowadays the archives are focusing not merely on the political Left, but also on the entire Hungarian history of the modern age.
According to its own rules, the archives are open for research, while the staff is ready to provide the necessary information and supplies data as well.
In the care of the archives there are 4298 running-metres of documents, and also 1215 cassettes and tapes, 30 discs and 284 rolls of research films.
The Hungarian right-wing government of FIDESZ-KDNP alliance with the assistance of the extreme right-neofascist opposition party Jobbik is attempting to confiscate both the majority of the materials of the archives and the headquarters building [1] of the Institute of Political History, since it is the last independent historical workshop in Hungary;[2] with its two-thirds majority in Parliament the government even changed the Hungarian Constitution to make its attacks against the institute legal.