A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part I: 1918-1968

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, authored by an international team of researchers, offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. 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 political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global "market of ideas" and help rethink some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought and modernity.

The second volume starts with the repercussions of the collapse of multinational empires in the region after World War I, 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 chronological starting point of Volume II/2 is the defeat of the vision of "socialism with a human face" in 1968 and the political discourses produced by the various "consolidation" or "normalization" regimes. It continues with mapping the exile communities' and dissidents' critical engagement with the local democratic and anti-democratic traditions as well as with 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.

Balazs Trencsenyi is Professor in the Department of History, Central European University Budapest. His research focuses on the comparative history of political thought in East Central Europe and the history of historiography. He is Co-Director of Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies at CEU and Editor of the periodical East Central Europe (Brill). His publications include A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (with Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopecek, OUP, 2016), The Politics of 'National Character': A Study in Interwar East European Thought (Routledge, 2012), Whose Love of Which Country?: Composite States, National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe (Brill, 2010), and Hungary and Romania beyond National Narratives: Comparisons and Entanglements (Peter Lang, 2013).



Michal Kopecek is Head of the Ideas and Concepts Department at the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, and Co-Director of Imre Kertesz Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. His publications include A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (with Balazs Trencsenyi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, OUP, 2016), and Quest for the Revolution's Lost Meaning: Origins of the Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe, 1953-1960 (forthcoming Brill, 2018).


Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic is a PhD candidate at the program in Comparative History of Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe at the Central European University, Budapest. His main fields of interest include intellectual history, nationalism, and history of political thought, with a focus on European peripheries and semi-peripheries. He co-authored a volume on modern radical ideologies ( Utopije demokracije, ZNK Masovna, 2005), and edited a volume on humanism in contemporary social and political thought ( Blodnjaki smisla: misliti humanizem danes, DHG, 2007). He is the editor of the Slovenian quarterly journal Razpotja.


Maria Falina is Lecturer in Modern European History at Dublin City University. Her main fields of interest are intellectual history, nationalism, and history of religion and politics. Her publications include A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (with Balazs Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, Maciej Janowski, and Monika Baar, OUP, 2016), and articles such as 'Between "Clerical Fascism" and Political Orthodoxy: Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Interwar Serbia' in Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions, (2007) 8/2: 247-258, and 'Religion Visible and Invisible: The Case of Post-Yugoslav Anti-War Films', in C. Schmitt and L. Berezhnaya, eds. Iconic Turn(s): Religion and Nation in East European Films after 1989 (Brill, 2013).

Monika Baar is Professor of Central European Studies at the University of Leiden. Her research focuses on modern historiography, cultural history and political thought, with special attention to the problem of marginality. Her publications include A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (with Balazs Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, Maciej Janowski, and Maria Falina, OUP, 2016), and Historians and the Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2010). She is Associate Editor of Nationalities Papers.

Maciej Janowski is Head of Section at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw and Visiting Professor at the Central European University, Budapest. His main fields of interest are social and intellectual history of Central Europe and the history of liberalism. He is editor of the periodical East Central Europe (Brill) and Deputy Editor of Kwartalnik Historyczny. His publications include A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (with Balazs Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, Monika Baar, and Maria Falina, OUP, 2016), and Polish Liberal Thought before 1918 (CEU Press, 2004).

Part I: Transcending Modernity: Interwar and Wartime Visions of Regeneration
1. Nation-State Building and its Alternatives
2. Liberalism on the Defensive
3. The Many Faces of Leftism
4. The 'Third Way'
5. Towards a Conservative Revolution
6. A New State for 'New Men'
7. World War II: Collaboration, Resistance, and Visions of the Postwar Orde
Part II: Hybridized Modernity: Communism, Reformism, and Dissent in a Divided Europe
8. The Postwar 'Transition Years'
9. Stalinism and De-Stalinization
10. Towards Socialism with a Human Face?
11. Political Thought in Exile
12. Late State Socialism: Consolidation, Legitimization, and Reform from Above
13. Dissidents and Opposition Movements
Part III: Farewell to Modernity? Thinking Politics After the 'End of History'
14. Velvet Revolutions and the Thorny Paths of Transition
15. 'Rebuilding the Boat on the Open Sea'
16. In Search of a New Ideology