A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe

Abstract

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume synthetic overview, authored by an international team of researchers. Covering twenty national cultures and 250 years, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of discourses. Its principal aim is to look at these cultures within the global “market of ideas” and also help rethink some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought and modernity as such. The second volume starts with the repercussions of the collapse of multinational empires in the region (Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov) after the First World War, followed by multiple cycles of democratization and authoritarian backlash. Analyzing the intellectual paradigms and debates of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist decades it shows that although the imposed Sovietization had similar blueprints, it also entailed a negotiation with local intellectual traditions. At the same time, the book identifies paradigms, such as revisionist Marxism, which were eminently transnational and crossed the Iron Curtain. The phenomenon of dissidence is also analyzed from this perspective, paying attention both to local traditions and global trends. Last but not least, rather than achieving the coveted “end of history,” the liberal democratic order created in East Central Europe after 1989 became increasingly contested from left and right alike. Thus, instead of a comfortable conclusion pointing to the European integration of most of these countries, the book closes with pertinent questions about the fragility of the democratic order in this part of the world and beyond.

Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation

“…Since when belonging to empires, most of these countries were non-industrialised peripheries (except for Czech and Slovenian lands), there was an acutely perceived "need" among elites to establish "national industries" and strengthen local capitalists. This position was opposed by "conservatives" and agrarian or rural "populists" believing that national survival needs to build on the rural and agrarian majorities of these countries, that most often formed the titular nations of the new states (Trencsényi et al, 2018). This political cleavage pitting pro-industry "cosmopolitans" and "liberals" against "conservatives" and "populists" resembles the political conflicts of the day present also in other parts of Europe (Italy, Germany, Scandinavia).…”

Marxist criticism of Soviet-type society in Czechoslovakia: The political thought of Egon Bondy after 1968

“…Such an attack on Václav Havel, not from the standpoints of the official propaganda but from an author banned by the regime, was unprecedented in the 1980s, and Bondy’s Nameless became the target of sharp criticisms in the samizdat press, above all from Alexandr Vondra 14 and Ivan Lamper, figures close to Václav Havel. 15 An account of this dispute is provided briefly by Trencsényi et al (2018: 171), Machovec (2001: 140–1) and by Bondy himself (Bondy, 2001c [1986]: 134–9).…”

“…The relatively late publication of Working Analysis is also evidently one of the reasons why the theoretical reflection on his political philosophy has been comparatively limited within the Anglophone environment, even if the situation in this respect has gradually begun to change in recent years (see e.g. Dunaj, 2018; Kögler and Dunaj, 2018; Trencsényi et al, 2018: 105, 171). A revival of interest in Bondy’s work is also taking place within the Czech environment.…”

Social science and Marxist humanism beyond collectivism in Socialist Romania

“…Over the previous decade, Marxism-Leninism had become the philosophical basis for all knowledge production in the state socialist countries of East Central Europe, a process that involved strategies with varying degrees of success (Connelly, 2000). Similarly, de-Stalinization inspired by Khrushchev's criticism of the cult of personality after the death of Stalin was taken up by social scientists very differently across East Central Europe: from the 1956 Revolution in Hungary and the challenge it posed to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, including in terms of its later interpretation (Birkás, 2018); to de-Stalinization attempts from within the party being promptly halted in Romania, followed by a wave of censorship and repression among social scientists around 1958; to resisting de-Stalinization altogether in the GDR (see Tismăneanu [2009] for national case studies; and Trencsényi et al [2018: Chapter 9]). Toward the beginning of the 1960s, as ‘revisionist’ approaches to Marxism gained momentum, social scientists from the Soviet Union and East Central Europe began discussing again the merits of various supposedly ‘pseudo-bourgeois’ disciplines, most notably sociology (Voříšek, 2007).…”

“…Second, the article engages with the historiography of social and political thought under state socialism. So far, this scholarship has privileged the study of dissident, liberal, and civil society discourses (for a comprehensive overview, see Trencsényi et al , 2018). Beyond the interest in revisionist Marxist traditions of political thought in the region as challenges to state socialism from within (Taras, 1992), Marxist social thought in East Central Europe has only received marginal attention compared to interwar political thought in the region.…”