Czechoslovak Generational Experience of 1968: The Intellectual History Perspective

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective). 1968 is universally considered as the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst the younger generation. This is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger generations—students in their early twenties, but also young intellectuals, artists, and political activists entering their professional careers—brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse. In this article, I demonstrate the intellectual clash of the generations of 1968: the older generation that represented Dubček’s famous “socialism with a human face” and that made the Prague Spring liberalization possible by introducing a set of reforms, and new political generations—of students and young intellectuals who rejected the idea of Reform Communism as insufficient for real democratic order. Examining each generation’s understanding of key political concepts such as “opposition” or “political pluralism” reveals that the younger generations had vastly different expectations of “socialism with a human face.”

Re-enchanting Modernity in the East and West: Comparative Perspectives on the Legacy of 1968. An Author Meets Her Reviewers: A Symposium

“…Her research article in the 2019 special section was titled "Czechoslovak generational experience of 1968: The Intellectual History Perspective." 10 For us, it was important to gauge how the ideas expressed in the essay might resonate with scholars who do research on the subject, out of their own intellectual curiosity, free from any previous emotional, political, or personal entanglements.…”

Beyond “The Power of the Powerless”: the Political Thought and Polemics of the Czechoslovak Opposition, 1977–1980

“…2 Pioneering studies of the richness and plurality of political thought among Czechoslovak dissidents include the English-language works of H. GordonSkilling (1981),Barbara Falk (2003), AviezerTucker (2000), and JonathanBolton (2012). More recent scholarship includes works on dissent by KristinaAndělová (2019;2021);Suk and Andělová (2018), and MichalKopeček (2019) are worthy of attention. hanyš East Central Europe 50 (2023) 279-303 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/02/2024 12:12:47AM via Open Access.…”