About the Book
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 (as well 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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Michal Kopecek (ICH, Prague), Piotr Wcislik (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 Wcislik (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. Rafal Matyja (WSB-NLU, Nowy Sacz): Polish Conservatism after Communism: Tradition of Sovereignty and Sovereignty of Tradition Zoltán Gábor Szucs (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, Stanislaw 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 Ðuraškovic (University of Zagreb): From “Husakism” to “Meciarism”: 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?
About the Author :
Michal Kopecek is Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague.
Piotr Wcislik is PhD candidate at the Central European University, Budapest, and currently affiliated with the Digital Humanities Center at IBL PAN, Warsaw.
Review :
"Based on the richness and merits of the volume, the readers are invited to discover that Thinking through Transition is not 'just another' book on an old topic, but essential reading for those who wish to understand the period in question. Furthermore, the novelty of the approach and the scholarly - and also public - usefulness of such a collective effort give ground to the hope that this volume is the first attempt in a series of historical reflections on our recent past and troubled present."
"There is, Kopeček and Wciślik argue, space for a ‘possible future intellectual history’ of East and Central Europe examining ‘the transfer and circulation of ideas from a bottom-up perspective’, focusing on specific contexts but retaining a broad sense of regional commonalities. It is this goal that their collection sets out to address. Thinking through Transition assembles a set of readable and engaging case studies which underline the need for historical and comparative perspectives based on well-grounded research which take debates in the region as its point of departure."
"The edited volume assembled by Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik offers a novel and refreshing take on the history of the political transformations of East Central Europe in the post-communist era, a field that has been long and eminently dominated by the normative and often a historical prescripts of “transitology” scholarship (and business). Though 1989 functions as the springboard of narration, several essays trace and connect discourses back to earlier intellectual genealogies; they demonstrate how both past intellectual standpoints and present concerns provided the particular ideological admixture and the choice of positionality in the present, drawing upon an arsenal of actual or fictitious continuities, discontinuities, and/or reconfigurations of political discourse, a circumstance perhaps best exemplified in the transformations of '1989' itself: from an initial symbol of consensual politics to a floating signifier and, eventually, a convenient moment of contestation in order to redraw the lines of the political. Moreover, this volume exemplifies the fact that intellectual history is not only about the life-cycle of ideas but also about the performativity of the political, in other words, the capacity of actors to occupy timely key political/ideological spaces in relation to their political opponents and therefore not only to define the political agenda but also to capture public space and social imagination. Thinking through Transition is certainly a brave and important step in the right direction."
"The approach taken in this monograph differs from that of traditional ‘transitology research’. It uncovers the rich intellectual landscape of post-1989 Eastern and Central Europe and offers an insider’s view to understanding the transformations, their origins, dynamics and consequences. Emphasis is placed on the conceptual foundations, trajectories and implications of intellectual history. The strong point of the book is that it tries to create a critical distance from the ‘transition period’ and ‘post-socialism era’, the conventional approaches in post-1989 ECE research. The authors impose on themselves exploratory objectives of analysis, their intention being to provoke scholarly debate and further investigation. This publication brings us closer to the historicity of the post-1989 period in ECE. The intellectual history of post-socialism contributes to a better understanding of the key political ideas developing and evolving in the post-socialist period. The book demonstrates sensitivity to regional dynamism and it brings exploratory value to the field."
