Thinking through Transition
Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-communism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (aswell as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
Introduction
Michal Kopeček (ICH, Prague), Piotr Wciślik (CEU, Budapest): Towards Intellectual History of Post-Socialism
Liberalism: Dissident Illusions and Disillusions
Ferenc Laczó (Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena): Five Faces of Post-Dissident Hungarian Liberalism: A Study in Agendas, Concepts and Ambiguities
Piotr Wciślik (CEU, Budapest): Totalitarianism and The Limits of the Political Thought of Polish Dissidents: Late Socialism and After.
Milan Znoj (Charles University, Prague): Václav Havel, His Idea of Civil Society and the Czech Liberal Tradition
Paul Blokker (University of Trento): The (Re-)Emergence of Constitutionalism in East-Central Europe
Conservatism: A Counter-Revolution?
Petr Roubal (ICH, Prague): The Conservative Counter-Revolution: Post-Dissident Neoconservatives in Post-communist Transformation.
Rafał Matyja (WSB-NLU, Nowy Sącz): Polish Conservatism after Communism: Tradition of Sovereignty and Sovereignty of Tradition
Zoltán Gábor Szűcs (Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest): The Abortion of a 'Conservative’ Constitution-Making: A Discourse Analysis of the 1994-1998 Failed Hungarian Constitution-Making Enterprise
Populism: Endemic Pasts and Global Effects
Camil Alexandru Parvu (University of Bucharest): Populism and Democratic Malaise in Post-Communist Romania
András Bozóki (CEU, Budapest): Configurations of Populism in Hungary
Juraj Buzalka (Comenius University, Bratislava): The Political Lives of Dead Populists in Post-Socialist Slovakia
The Left: Between Communist Legacy and Neoliberal Challenge
Agnes Gagyi (Moholy-Nagy University of Arts, Budapest): Non-Post-Communist Left in Hungary after 1989: Diverging Paths of Leftist Criticism, Civil Activism and Radicalizing Constituency
Maciej Gdula (University of Warsaw): The Architecture of Revival: Left-Wing Ideas and Politics in Poland after 2002
Stanislav Holubec (Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena): Czech Post-Communist Intellectual Left. Twenty Years of Seeking Own Identity
Zsófia Lóránd (CEU, Budapest): Feminist Criticism of the “New Democracies” in Serbia and Croatia in the early 1990s
Politics of History: Nations, Wars, Revolutions
James Mark (University of Exeter), Muriel Blaive (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Vienna), Adam Hudek (Historical Institute SAV, Bratislava), Anna Saunder, Stanisław Tyszka: Remembering the End of Communism in East-Central Europe
Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Budapest): A Fate for a Nation. Concepts of History and the Nation in the Hungarian Politics, 1989-2010
Stevo Đurašković (University of Zagreb): From “Husakism” to “Mečiarism”: The National Identity-Building Discourse of the Slovak left-wing Intellectuals in the 1990s Slovakia
Zoltán Dujisin (CEU, Budapest): Post-Communist Europe: On the Path to Regional Regime of Remembrance?