Self-Government in Late 1980s Czechoslovakia: The Slovak Philosopher Miroslav Kusý against the Communist Party1

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-452
Author(s):  
Dirk Mathias Dalberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
State Enterprise ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Public

Self-government is one of the most popular terms in left-wing political thought. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was used and discussed both in Western liberal democracies and in the communist bloc. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used this notion from the mid-1980s onwards, forming part of his wider policy of perestroika. Although the Czechoslovak leaders were not interested in political reforms and were largely sceptical about economic changes, the Soviet example resonated with the public and impacted on official discussion in Czechoslovakia. In this context, the Czechoslovak parliament adopted the Act on State Enterprise in July 1988, which was preceded by the discussion of the Proposal on the Act on State Enterprise (1987). This article draws attention to Czechoslovak dissident milieus and the response to the parliament’s proposal. It focuses on the Slovak philosopher Miroslav Kusý (1931-2019), who articulated the most substantial critique of the official plans. While accepting the principle of self-government, he argued that the proposal was subject to fundamental misinterpretations. In assessing his arguments, the article traces a particular intervention within the wider debates on state socialism in the 1980s.

Mikhail Gorbachev: The Decay of Socialism and the Renaissance of Eastern Europe (From the Perspective of an Insider)

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceslav Ciobanu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Market Reforms ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Distinguished Leaders

This article provides an insider’s view of Gorbachev’s policy “perestroika and glasnost” as it related to the former Central and Eastern European socialist countries. The author describes Gorbachev’s relations with the leaders of communist parties of the Warsaw Treaty. A participant in many of Gorbachev’s meetings with his counterparts, the author analyzes the emergence of democracy and market reforms in these countries. He observed two distinct groups of socialist leaders, one relatively progressive and reform oriented and the other consisting of hardliners with traditional views opposed to any political and economic change. The author describes their attitude toward Gorbachev’s reforms. Based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader, the author also identifies some of the characteristics that made Mikhail Gorbachev one of the most distinguished leaders of the twentieth century, based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader. The author’s description highlights lesser-known aspects of Gorbachev’s performance that complete a portrait of this complex person.

The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuel Schiller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Regulatory Policies ◽  
Airline Deregulation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Right ◽  
American Left

This article examines the politics of airline deregulation in the 1970s, and the events that led to the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It links the antibureaucratic, antiregulatory policies of the 1970s to ideas closely connected to the New Left, the counterculture, and other left-wing subcultures that dominated high and low thought in the 1960s. By linking this source of antibureaucratic sentiment to the politics of airline deregulation, this article suggests a new direction for historians who study the American state in the last decades of the twentieth century. As they focus their attention on the rise of market-based, neoliberal regulatory policies, they should look for their origins not only in the growing strength of the intellectual and political right, but also in the political thought and practice of the 1960s left.

Political acclamation, social media and the public mood

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Dean
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity.

Is economic inequality a universal evil?

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
The State ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
A Current

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.

The Samarin Family and the Parish Question in the Russian Empire. 1860s–1910s

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
Alexey L. Beglov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

The article examines the contribution of the representatives of the Samarin family to the development of the Parish issue in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The issue of expanding the rights of the laity in the sphere of parish self-government was one of the most debated problems of Church life in that period. The public discussion was initiated by D.F. Samarin (1827-1901). He formulated the “social concept” of the parish and parish reform, based on Slavophile views on society and the Church. In the beginning of the twentieth century his eldest son F.D. Samarin who was a member of the Special Council on the development the Orthodox parish project in 1907, and as such developed the Slavophile concept of the parish. In 1915, A.D. Samarin, who took up the position of the Chief Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, tried to make his contribution to the cause of the parish reforms, but he failed to do so due to his resignation.

Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Noémi Bíró
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Feminism ◽  
Definition Of

"Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory. Arendt’s typology of human activity and her arguments on the precondition of politics allow for a variety in interpretations for contemporary political thought. The feminist reception of Arendt’s work ranges from critical to conciliatory readings that attempt to find the points in which Arendt’s theory might inspire a feminist political project. In this paper I explore the ways in which feminist thought has responded to Arendt’s definition of action, freedom and politics, and whether her theoretical framework can be useful in a feminist rethinking of politics, power and the public realm. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, political action, the Public, the Social, feminism "

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

1. The Neoliberal Logic of Service-Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Snider Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Community Partnerships ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Community Based ◽  
University Partnerships ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Relationship

<?page nr="1"?>Abstract This article investigates the ways in which service-learning manifests within our neoliberal clime, suggesting that service-learning amounts to a foil for neoliberalism, allowing neoliberal political and economic changes while masking their damaging effects. Neoliberalism shifts the relationship between the public and the private, structures higher education, and promotes a façade of community-based university partnerships while facilitating a pervasive regime of control. This article demonstrates that service-learning amounts to an enigma of neoliberalism, making possible the privatization of the public and the individualizing of social problems while masking evidence of market-based societal control. Neoliberal service-learning distances service from teaching and learning, allows market forces to shape university-community partnerships, and privatizes the public through dispossession by accumulation.

Accounting and Control as Mechanisms for Solving Economic Problems as Viewed by Russian Citizens of the Perestroika Era (Based on the Analysis of Letters to the Authorities)

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Ol’ga D. Popova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Cooperative Movement ◽  
Administrative Reforms ◽  
Regulatory Measures ◽  
And Control ◽  
Boris Yeltsin

This article deals with the public attitude toward the economic reforms of 1989–1990, specifically, the citizens’ suggestions on how to improve the country’s economy. The author analyses previously unpublished letters written by Russian citizens and addressed to the country’s leaders (Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev) or sent to Soviet newspapers. To investigate people’s mental attitudes, the article focuses not only on social polling, but also on emotions, feelings, and thoughts shared by the letterwriters. The author of this article maintains that many citizens feared that the country would be swept away by the avalanche of capitalism and were prejudiced against perestroika-induced innovations. Habitual mental attitudes were undermined by the cooperative movement and private entrepreneurship. Various unrealistic and paradoxical suggestions were not infrequently made by the letter-writers who knew very little, if anything, about market economy. The majority of people suggested that command economy with its bureaucratic flavour should be improved. The analysis shows that Russian citizens’ mental attitudes were predominantly shaped by the notion of a bipolar world, as well as by Vladimir Lenin’s teaching about the socialist state and its role in the accounting and control over the Soviet state. The letters demonstrate that Russian citizens hoped to upgrade the Soviet economy through improvements introduced into the system of accounting and control, through harsher regulatory measures imposed on the economic system, as well as through rationing and strictly supervised distribution of goods. Many people believed that socialism was inviolable and that the Soviet economy could be improved by means of administrative reforms.

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