A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, 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 revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is the final part of the project, following Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century', and Volume II, Part I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' (1918-1968) (OUP, 2018). Its starting point 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 domestic dissidents' critical engagement with the local democratic and anti-democratic traditions as well as with global trends. Rather than achieving the coveted 'end of history', however, 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 a reflection on the fragility of democracy in this part of the world and beyond.

Balázs Trencsényi 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 Kopeček, 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 Kopeček is Head of the Ideas and Concepts Department at the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, and Co-Director of Imre Kertész 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 Balázs Trencsényi, 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 Gabrijelčič 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 though