A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages, the ensuing work goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of discourses. Devising a regional perspective, the authors avoid projecting the Western European analytical and conceptual schemes on the whole continent, and develop instead new concepts, patterns of periodization and interpretative models. At the same time, they also reject the self-enclosing Eastern or Central European regionalist narratives and instead emphasize the multifarious dialogue of the region with the rest of the world. Along these lines, the two volumes are intended to make these cultures available for the global 'market
of ideas' and also help rethinking some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such.
The first volume deals with the period ranging from the Late Enlightenment to the First World War. It is structured along four broader chronological and thematic units: Enlightenment reformism, Romanticism and the national revivals, late nineteenth-century institutionalization of the national and state-building projects, and the new ideologies of the fin-de-siecle facing the rise of mass politics. Along these lines, the authors trace the continuities and ruptures of political discourses. They focus especially on the ways East Central European political thinkers sought to bridge the gap between the idealized Western type of modernity and their own societies challenged by overlapping national projects, social and cultural fragmentation, and the lack of institutional continuity.
Author(s): Balazs Trencsenyi; Maciej Janowski; Monika Baar; Maria Falina; Michal Kopecek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 704
City: New York
Cover
A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Discovery of Modernity: Enlightened Statecraft, Discourses of Reform, and Civilizational Narratives
1: The Politics of Improvement: European Models and Local Traditions
1.1 Forging a new ``reason of state´´
1.2 Legitimizing and reforming the estate system
1.3 Patriotic allegiance and national mobilization
2: National Projects and Civilizational Hierarchies
2.1 Expansion of the ``public sphere´´
2.2 Polishing the language: The emergence of vernacularism and its political subtext
2.3 Ancient glory and stadial development: Enlightenment narratives of the past
2.4 The rising interest in archaism and the problem of the ``internal other´´
3: The Repercussions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
3.1 Fascination and abhorrence
3.2 The ``Historical Sublime´´ knocking at the back door: Napoleon and East Central Europe
3.3 After 1815: Legitimism and the harbingers of Romantic nationalism
Part II: Spiritualizing Modernity: The Romantic Framework of Political Ideas
4: ``Playing the Piano that does not yet have Strings´´? The Cultural-Political Programs of the ``National Revivals´´
4.1 The long life of Enlightenment ideas
4.2 The quest for emancipation
4.3 ``Not dead, but sleepeth´´: Discourses of national awakening
4.4 Ruins and resurrections: The search for suitable ancestors
4.5 Between national and supranational loyalties
4.6 From ``Missionism´´ to Messianism
5: Political Visions of the Vormärz
5.1 The emergence of the liberal nationalist project
5.2 Moderates and radicals in the reform movement
5.3 Critiques of national awakening
6: Brotherhood and Disappointment: 1848 and its Aftermath
6.1 Visions of revolutionary transformation
6.2 The ``social issue´´ during the revolutions
6.3 The clash of national aspirations
6.4 Ideologists of the Counter-Revolution: Forward to the Past?
6.5 The aftermath of the Revolution: Self-criticism and anti-absolutism
Part III: Institutionalizing Modernity: Conceptions of State-Building and Nation-Building in the Second Half of the Nineteen Century
7: The Interplay of National and Imperial Principles of Organization
7.1 Solving the riddle of the ``Eastern Question´´
7.2 ``With you, Our Most Gracious Monarch, we stay and wish to stay´´: Ideologies of Compromise, Dualism, and Trialism
7.3 The rise of pan-NATIONAL ideologies
8: The Political Implications of Positivism
8.1 The ``critical turns´´: Challenging the Romantic constructions
8.2 Positivist historical narratives
8.3 Studying the nation
8.4 Overcoming backwardness: The discourses of ``national economy´´
9: The Rise and Fall of ``National Liberalism´´ after 1848
9.1 The paradigm shift of the liberal doctrine
9.2 Liberalism and the ``Church Question´´
9.3 The anti-liberal left
9.4 The merger of ethnicism and conservatism: The emergence of political anti-Semitism
Part IV: Taming Modernity: The Fin de Siècle and the Rise of Mass Politics
10: Liberals, Conservatives, and Mass Politics
10.1 Responses to ``politics in a new key´´
10.2 The limits of liberalism
10.3 The new conservatives: Attempts at mobilization
10.4 Fin-de-siècle religion and politics: Between modernism and neo-traditionalism
10.5 The rise of integral nationalism
11: The Left and the Ambiguity of the Marxist Package
11.1 Civic radicalism: Intellectuals in search of a new identity
11.2 Socialism and underdevelopment
11.3 Agrarian populism: An East Central European local tradition?
11.4 Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists: Contesting evolutionary socialism
12: Coping with Diversity
12.1 Multiethnicity as a political issue
12.2 Federalism as a solution to the nationality question
12.3 Supranational theories and transnational movements
12.4 The ``Jewish Question´´: The entanglement of assimilation, anti-Semitism, and Zionism
13: The Faces of Modernity
13.1 The modernization of historiography and the sociological gaze
13.2 Individualism, decadence, and collective regeneration
13.3 The ``Women´s Question´´ and feminism
14: The Great War
14.1 War aims and visions of the future
14.2 Projects of regional reorganization
14.3 National mobilization and social disintegration
Select Bibliography
Index
