Drawing up the balance sheet of political science research in Eastern Europe in the last twelve to twenty years, do we discover ‘more or less brilliant errors’, as Leo Strauss suggested in another context, or do we discover brilliant ideas? Probably both. Below, I give my personal view of what has happened in our discipline in the last twenty years, suggesting them mottos, genres, and questions that have characterised our work. It race the trajectory of our discipline between 1980 and 2002, from what I call ‘The Age of Expectations’ to our present ‘Age of Perplexity’ from an age of plans and proposals to an age of questions and questions.

The mottos of this period might be ‘The squaring of the circle’. Why? Because we social scientists who lived and worked in those years tried to solve something that could not be solved. We tried to transform state socialism into democracy and the market economy without the Soviet Union or our own aparatchiks noticing.