Entangled Paths Towards Modernity
The book is a study in comparative intellectual history and discusses how socialist ideology emerged as an option of political modernity in the Balkans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Focusing on how technologies of ideological transfer and adaptation work, the book examines the introduction and contextualization of international socialist paradigms in the Southeast European periphery. At its core is the presentation of three case studies (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece), intertwined at times through similar, but also divergent paths. Each case aspires to tell a different and yet complementary story with respect to the issue of modernity and socialism. The book analyses the introduction of socialism against the background and in conjunction to other prominent options of political modernity such as nationalism, liberalism and agrarianism.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
I. Introduction
- Methodology
- Context, Ideology, Adaptation
II. Intellectuals
- The Russian Connection and the Geography of Revolution
- Models and Master Texts
- Balkan Disciples
- Intellectuals and Political Systems
- Social Descent and Professional Integration
III. The Ambiguities of Modernity (Serbia)
- Some Notes on the Historiography
- The Ideological Roots of Serbian Socialism
- Modernization and its Antecedents
- A Moral World Imperiled
- The Mission: Saving Serbdom
- The Individual and Society
- The Radicals and the Nation
- A l’attaque
- The Railway
- The Agrarian Radicals
- A Popular Party
- The Watershed
- A Church and an Army
- Slavophilism
- To the People
- Manipulating the Past
- Heading for Confrontation
- Constitutional Philosophy
- In Power
- Legacies of Radicalism
IV. Caught up in the Contradictions of Modernity (Bulgaria)
- The Historiography on the Schism
- Bulgarian Socialism
- Sŭiuz vs. Partiia: The Priority of Political or Economic Organization?
- Blagoev vs. the Narodniks
- Constructing the Social subject: a Party with two Voices
- Modernization
- Mentalities
- The Profile of the Party
- Flirting with the Peasant
- “Obshto Delo”
- “Alarm for Ghosts--Our Apostasy or their Nonsense”
- Historical Materialism not Economic Determinism
- The Debate on Private Ownership
- The Debate on Party Membership
- The Predicament of Bulgaria
- Theory and Practice
- How to Make Sense of Broad Socialism
- Rethinking Bulgarian Politics
V. Modernity Without Socialism (Greece)
- Historiographical Notes
- Greek Nationalism: the Imaginary of Superiority
- Some Particularities of Greek Socio-Economic Development
- Intellectuals: the Discrete Temptation of Submission
- The Liberals: Progress, Expansion and Order
- The National Schism: Metamorphoses of Political Polarization
- “The Promise of the Impossible Revolution”
VI. Epilogue
- Divergent Paths Towards Modernity?
- Legitimacy and Mass Politics
- Socialism
- Politics and the State
- Legacies