The title under review is A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, and it is hard to imagine we will ever get a more all-inclusive one. On every conceivable political topic of broad public discussion, the authors mine the historical record to reveal an astonishing multitude of thinkers; a grand plethora of ideas. No major thinker that I can recall has been omitted, and dozens I have never heard of I have thankfully been introduced to.
The entire project clocks in at about 1500 pages. A large research grant gave the six authors five years to put together in a single narrative work with the huge amount of material they had already generated by preparing specialized political thought analogies for students. The six principle authors engaged an occasional research team of about twenty-five scholars and traveled to intellectual centers in every corner of the region north and south to make sure they took into account even minor thinkers participating in major debates. The result is a tour de force that documents and introduces to a global readership thinkers who have profoundly shaped European society since its rise to global hegemony, but have been almost entirely excluded from the voluminous number of works on “European political thought.” (The authors note that in a 1998 volume titled European Political Thought, 1815–1989, only seven of 258 pages deal with central European thinkers, and those speak only of the pre-1989 dissidents.) So it is the major accomplishment of this project to discuss only central European thinkers from the last two centuries, and to insist on taking the space to do so in such detail.
Before proceeding further, a word on the nature of the publication. The entire project comes in two volumes but three tomes. Volume One, published in 2016, covers the period from the Enlightenment to World War I, and deals with the emergence of national ways of thinking in a region mostly lacking independent states. Volume Two, totaling 850 pages, is divided into two “parts,” published separately, and divided chronologically, with Part I covering 1918–1968 and Part II 1968–2018. The Introduction to the whole work is printed only in Volume One, a serious shortcoming for readers of either part of Volume Two, who encounter their books without any preliminary discussion of what exactly they are reading. This review focuses only on the two tomes of Volume Two, while assessing also the Introduction from Volume One in order to consider the relationship of what the authors intended with what they have produced.
As for Volume Two, it is impossible to think of a single important topic of the last century that is left out. Each chapter begins with an urgent topic of the time and lays out the views of diverse political commentators throughout the region, one after the other. For example, in the first chapter on the question of self-determination of nations immediately following World War I, we read of the “humanist-realist” views of Tomáš Masaryk, encounter Ukrainian and Baltic thinkers who thought a regional federation even under the continued dominance of Russia might be more practical and desirable than independence, and then hear of the intense, multi-sided debates about minority rights and the question of nationalism. Following a chapter on the decline of liberalism, a chapter on “the many faces of leftism” in the interwar period documents both its increasing radicalization and the search for a democratic socialism. Introducing the huge variety of leftist thought—urban and rural, peasantist and workerist, statist and technocratic—is a major accomplishment in itself. Subsequent chapters interrogate the “Third Way,” or proponents of rural and peasant-based solutions to the apparently intractable problems of modernity; the emerging “conservative revolution,” rooted in the simultaneous rise of “catastrophist,” religious fundamentalist, and authoritarian modernizing tendencies; and fascist and corporatist thought during World War II as well as defenses of both collaboration and resistance. The discussion then moves to the wide-open conversations of the postwar period concerning the desired and/or realistic possibilities for the future, and the first book of Volume Two ends with chapters on the debates (yes, debates) about Stalinism, and on the attractions of “revisionism” (452, 568).
The second tome of Volume Two takes up the apparent stability (or is stalemate?) of the 1960s and 70s, explores debates within east European émigré circles, and covers the claims and logic of the dissidents and oppositionists. The volume concludes with three post-1989 chapters, on the debates about transition (including the contradictions of the supposed “liberal consensus”), arguments over state-building and constitutions, and, finally, on new “post-transition” thought, with strands promoting right-wing national populism, now well-known due to governments in Hungary and Poland, “new left” ideas bubbling under the surface, and reflections on “post-colonialism.” Interspersed through the chapters are discussions on the ever-present minority politics of the region. On Jews, for example, we hear not only the diatribes of the anti-Semites but the debates within and between emigrationist Zionists, Bundists favoring civic assimilation with maintenance of an autonomous Yiddishkayt culture, as well as liberals and communists.
There are undeniable advantages of such a mammoth history of thought written by a group of authors informed by country experts and top scholars throughout the entire region. A plethora of common phenomena, across countries and languages, can be analyzed better than any single author could manage. For example, on one page (Part I: 399–400) exploring political art of the late 1960s are references to the Hungarian Miklós Jancsó’s film Roundup together with the Bulgarians Radoy Ralin and Valeri Petrov's play Improvisation, Jerzy Grotowski's and Tadeusz Kantor's theatrical productions in Poland, Slovenian playwright Dominik Smole, and Yugoslav art collectives with their related avant-garde journals Perspektive and Revija 57. Apage from the “velvet revolutions” chapter (Part II: 196–97) includes observations from Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Slovenians, and Czechs. There is scarcely a single page focused on one thinker or even one country, which is also the biggest problem with the book, as discussed below. Instead we are shown the entire region simultaneously. The text goes back and forth between political thought from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, with only slightly less space devoted to thinkers from Albania, the Baltic republics, Belarus, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, while in terms of sheer pages theorists from the former Yugoslavia probably boast the largest representation.
What unites the disparate voices is that they all issue from the semi-periphery, from a region that has experienced all the great and terrible “isms” of the past century without being able to autonomously control the shape of events. Thinkers discuss grand ideas of the world while cognizant that no grand armies or powerful states stand ready to implement them. For me, it is this combination of urgent reflection yet awareness of dependence that make their ideas so compelling, raw, and relevant. We get here on display the kinds of intense, focused, vital discussions that outsiders looking at central Europe have always found so alluring. Ideas have mattered here because the future has almost always seemed uncertain, and discussions concerning uncertainty are by their nature universal: other peoples can and will confront problems and contradictions resulting from nationalism, liberalism, fascism, socialism, and globalization. For whatever crisis some part of the world may be going through, thinkers in east central Europe have come up with some ideas. Far more than anything, a work of this sort raises the question of alternatives. The books are filled with reflections on paths that could have been followed, and many that might still be. One can wander the pages at random and be assured of finding gems.
In the end, I would consider this less a history than a handbook or even encyclopedia of east central European political thought, though this might partly be because I am a political scientist reviewing a work by intellectual historians. I understand a work of history as having a certain argument and overarching theme which comes to a certain conclusion, while the authors conceptualize their project as a “comparative history” that interprets “discourses, concepts, and political languages as interfaces of different cultural and political orientations” (Vol. 1: 10). All three tomes do focus on discourse and concepts. Their chapters hone in on topics and issues that any historian or political scientist would recognize as fundamental to the political history of the region. Yet each chapter has a scattered nature to it, jumping from one thinker and country to another. One cannot just pick up one of the books and read it straight through, since no one page necessarily follows another in terms of continuing a certain line of argument. Open to any page and something interesting will stand out. Pick a topic you are interested in and you will learn about the many of people who wrote about it. You will not learn much here about that person's work (though he or she might reappear later), since after a few lines it is off to the next person, but you will know whose work to search if you wish to delve deeper into the topic. Also, while we hear about many thinkers from many periods in many countries, we do not get a sense of which ideas were prominent or hegemonic at any given moment, or why. Did political power decide which ideas prevailed? Yet political power is largely absent (neither Jarosław Kaczyński nor Viktor Orbán are presented here). We are introduced to an incredible richness of east central European intellectual life, yet we do not learn whether and how the various debates mattered.
These weaknesses aside, there is no question that all three tomes will be incredibly useful to students—of the region and of European political thought—for a long time to come. By showing the astonishing breadth and quality of debates coming from east central Europe, on topics that west Europeans often ignored or just did not notice, the authors return these ideas to the center of European thought, where of course they belong.
