I

In her 1996 collection of essays, the Croatian writer, Dubravka Ugrešić, recounted a conversation with a Western European friend:

Written seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the shockwaves of the Yugoslav wars still reverberated through the continent, Ugrešić’s essays spoke to a period of European history in which the West's lack of familiarity with the East was particularly marked. In part owing to this Western incomprehension, the period of the 1990s were a rich one for theoretical discussions within the field of Eastern European Studies, as scholars sharing Ugrešić’s concerns turned their attention to the ways in which Eastern Europe had come to be imagined as that great blank space beyond the wall.Footnote ²

Although this research did a great deal to draw attention to Eastern Europe and promote its (re)integration into European history more broadly, its effects have not radiated into all fields of the discipline equally. In the field of intellectual history the bulk of scholarship since the 1990s has continued to focus solely on the literary, philosophical and artistic cultures of the metropolitan centres of Western Europe and there have been relatively few efforts to break down the imagined divisions of the continent and to aim for a more integrated account of European intellectual movements. This hesitancy can be chalked up to at least three factors. First, there is the tendency for intellectual historians to conceive of their object of study in strictly national terms – ‘the French philosophical tradition’, ‘Weimar culture’, ‘British political economy’ – which poses an obstacle to thinking at a more holistic, European level. Second, the practical question of access to texts, few of which have appeared in translation, requires scholars to possess proficiency in languages that are rarely studied and are increasingly underfunded in Western academia. Finally, there is the mistaken assumption (often unarticulated) that Eastern Europe, held back by economic underdevelopment and decades of repressive communist rule, simply lacks the vibrant intellectual cultures on offer in the West. As such, much of the research on key intellectual movements whose scope was pan-European has tended to take its cues from their articulation within a solely Western context.Footnote ³

However, as recent literature in the field of Eastern European history has begun to show, careful and nuanced study of the region's philosophical and cultural movements has significant implications for our wider appreciation of European intellectual history. Not only does this research demonstrate that Eastern European thinkers were central interlocutors and contributors to some of the most influential intellectual trends in modern European history, they also force us to reconsider existing historiography of movements such as structuralism, phenomenology and surrealism. In the case of these three currents of thought, which will be examined more extensively below, intellectual history has tended to centre on their emergence within a specifically French (and, at least in the case of phenomenology, German) context, thereby overlooking their growth further afield in places such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary or Yugoslavia. Each of these countries, however, was home to autochthonous intellectual traditions that engaged, developed and altered the ideas of these movements and in the process imbued them with local political, religious and artistic concerns. The structuralism of the Prague Circle, to take one illustrative example, while bearing obvious discursive similarities with that of the Swiss and French structuralists, was informed by an indigenous tradition of Russian biological thought that led its exponents to hold profoundly different assumptions regarding the object and objectives of linguistic science. Indeed, as we will see, beyond simply revealing a wider and more diverse intellectual genealogy of structuralism, the case of the Prague Circle questions the very coherence of the term ‘structuralism’ in general. The inclusion or recuperation, therefore, of thinkers from what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka once called ‘that other Europe,’ deepens but also complicates our wider understandings of these three movements.

II

Derek Sayer's latest work, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, confidently demonstrates some of the historiographical implications offered by the inclusion of Eastern Europe in modern intellectual history. The text, which focuses on (but does not limit its scope to) intellectual life in the capital of interwar Czechoslovakia, is a rich, dense and entertaining examination of the place of Prague in European thought in the twentieth century. The city in this work, however, is both geographically and temporally porous, functioning as much as an organising concept than as an actual site of intellectual production. While some chapters use the physical spaces of the city to guide us through a wider discussion of Czech intellectual and cultural history, in others the city plays only a tangential role as a node in a larger cross-European network of ideas. In other words, this is not a work of urban history or even a cultural history delimited to a single city, à la Schorske's Vienna; rather, Sayer uses the different conceptual registers of the city to explore various historical themes.Footnote ⁴ The end result reorients traditional perspectives, decentres the grand narratives of Czech history and brings to the foreground the repressed, absurd and curious contributions Prague made to European thought and culture in the twentieth century.

Sayer's work grows out of an engagement with Walter Benjamin's influential 1935 essay ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in which the unorthodox Marxist philosopher sought to ‘recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’.Footnote ⁵ Building off Benjamin's project but removing its Marxist assumptions, Sayer aims to go further and use Prague to reflect on the nature of modernity more broadly: ‘The monuments that I seek to recognize as ruins are those of modernity itself; or at least, to be a little more modest, of what has been construed as modernity in the grand narratives that have been so central to the self-consciousness of the age’ (11). The project, in effect, aims to use Prague to compose a kind of ‘secret history’ of European modernity, to view its grandiose claims from a position that is often perceived as its periphery but which actually, as Sayer reminds us, stood at its centre. The stakes of this project, then, move far beyond the subfield of Eastern European history. Prague, or, to be more specific, the intellectuals and ideas that inhabited, shaped and were shaped by the city, serves as both an exemplar of European modernity and its own immanent critique.

It is this dual role of Prague – both exemplar and critique – that leads Sayer to describe the work as ‘a surrealist history’. By this he does not simply mean a history of Prague surrealism, although, to be sure, the Prague surrealists (and their Parisian cousins dangereux) are reappearing characters in this story. The work opens with the visit of Andre Breton and Paul Eluard to Prague in March 1935 and the close intellectual friendship they established with Vitězslav Nezval and Karel Teige (13–22). Elsewhere we are introduced to the work of the artist Jindřich Štyrsky, his psychoanalytic interpreter Bohuslav Brouk and the gender-bending performance and erotic artwork of Toyen (245–247, 264–269). As a standalone element of the work this history of surrealism offers important contributions to the intellectual history of the interwar avant-gardes, reminding us of the rich collaborations and exchanges that took place between Czech, Slovak and French intellectuals.

However, Prague, Capital of Modernity, goes beyond a history of surrealism; it is at the same time a surrealist history. True to his overarching historiographical agenda – ‘to recognize as ruins the monuments of modernity’ – Sayer adopts some of the aesthetic techniques of his muses to break with the grand narratives toward which historical writing tends. The work rarely relies on stable narratives, instead drifting across the historical landscape of Prague in an almost dreamlike way, at one moment pursuing the biography of a globe-trotting poet, at another guided by the threads of a particular aesthetic concept and at the next exploring the history of a town square or memorial across several centuries. The effect is a dense tapestry of narratives that at once exhibits the richness of the city's intellectual heritage and reconstructs the city as ‘a dreamworld of signs and symbols, memories and desires’ (45).

The sense of this ‘dreamworld’ is nicely captured in Sayer's perhaps most ‘urban’-themed chapter, ‘Metamorphoses,’ which leads the reader through the twists and turns of the Prague cityscape. Reconstructing the tangled network of paths and streets provides a foundation upon which Sayer brings together an impressive list of Prague's intellectuals and artists – Franz Kafka, the Čapek brothers, Milan Kundera, Milena Jesenska, Karel Teige, Jiři Weil, Bohumil Hrabal, the Devětsil group and the performances of the Prague Free Theatre. Although the choice to structure the chapter in such a way will certainly disorient the reader – and one would hesitate before assigning it to undergraduates – it is an ingenious technique for reinforcing Sayer's overarching goal, to present Prague as both the centre and critique of European modernity. The structure forces the reader to consider the history of the city not in terms of a single grand narrative, but in its fragmentary, overlapping and contradictory parts: ‘How many worlds, might we ask, does a city encompass – and whose measures should we use to reckon the distances between them?’ (124). Sayer neither offers nor expects an answer to this question, and his work instead aims to demonstrate what an approach founded on the multiplicity of urban worlds can achieve.

III

Interwar Prague also provides the backdrop to Patrick Seriot's Structure and the Whole: East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins of Structural Linguistics. Like Sayer, Seriot aims to reorient dominant narratives of European intellectual history by marshalling the work of the continent's Eastern thinkers in ways that problematise the field's long-held assumptions. The text is a careful intellectual history of continental structuralism that centres not on the work of its better-known French and Swiss proponents, but on the ideas of the Russian émigrés that participated in the interwar Prague Circle of linguists, namely Nikolai Trubetskoi, Roman Jakobson and the geographer Petr Savitskii. By so bracketing the francocentric history of structuralism, Seriot is able to pursue close readings of these intellectuals’ works to isolate central ideas and metaphors that highlight the multiple and at times mutually-contradictory strands of thought from which European structuralism drew. One of the central arguments pursued here is that the structuralism of the Prague Russians, while sharing some of the vocabulary of their Swiss and French interlocutors, in fact drew from quite different intellectual traditions, most notably from organicist ideas of ‘the whole’ in early German Romantic thought. This alternative genealogy allows the author to highlight the wider socio-political context in which Trubetskoi, Jakobson and Savitskii operated and the deep connection between their structuralist ideas and the geopolitical project of Eurasianism to which they were committed.

Traditionally, the intellectual history of structuralism in Europe begins with the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the posthumous 1916 publication of his highly influential Course in General Linguistics. From there, references are generally made to the Prague Circle, but limit their concern to Trubetskoi and Jakobson's elaboration of phonology. The height of structuralism is generally identified with the proliferation of linguistic models across the social sciences in post-war France through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser. While the Prague Circle was certainly an important part of that intellectual trajectory, the group's ideas are often explored selectively, divorcing their methodological writings from the broader intellectual milieu of interwar Prague.Footnote ⁶ Constructed through this narrative, structuralism comes to be associated with a handful of central concepts that were essential for reorienting the epistemological and methodological systems of French linguistics, anthropology, sociology, history, psychoanalysis and literature. The most important of these concepts is the insistence on understanding distinct phenomena as part of a structure, generally conceived, in line with Saussure's work, as a system of relations. These systems, he believed, were composed of differential elements whose meanings were given only through their relation with other elements internal to the system. The approach necessarily implied a certain degree of closure within such systems; they were more or less self-contained, a ‘whole’ or ‘totality’.Footnote ⁷

Seriot proposes to compromise this neat intellectual history by returning to it the fullness of the Prague Russians’ structuralism and its political valences. In so doing, he exposes a deeper conceptual rift between Western and Eastern European structuralism. This rift turns on the precise definition the respective movements gave to the term ‘structure’. As Seriot notes: ‘the tormented history of European or “continental” structuralism. . .harbours a misunderstanding that is due to the fact that the key notion of structure can be grasped in two ways: as an ontological whole or a system or relations, as a real object or an object defined for study purposes’ (17). It was the ontological definition, he contends, that underpinned the intellectual project of Trubetskoi, Jakobson and Savitskii; that is, rather than an epistemological framework that organised phenomena into internally differentiated systems of relations, they understood structures to be ontological forms that underpinned geo-cultural systems. In this they relied heavily on organicist and vitalist metaphors derived from various anthropological, philosophical and biological movements whose conceptual roots lay in German Romantic ideas of Naturphilosophie (218).

As Seriot shows, the idea of structures as ontological systems was integral to the wider project of early twentieth century Eurasianism to which the Prague Russians were committed, and the book doubles as an intellectual history of Eurasianist thought. As a political-ideological movement, Eurasianism was an attempt to reimagine the Russian imperial project and justify its territorial claims through the language of modern social science. For Eurasianists, the key legitimating claim for Russian empire was the internal coherence of the geo-cultural system of what they termed ‘Eurasia’ – a cultural and political entity whose ‘singularity. . .was the product of ancient, creative collaboration between Eastern Slavs and the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples of Eurasian lands’ (30). Eurasia was conceived as neither part of Europe, nor of Asia, but was rather a ‘third continent’ whose contours were yet to be fully traced.

The difficulty with which Eurasianists were confronted was the need to identify and defend the properties that demarcated the ‘singularity’ of Eurasia, a region united neither by language, nationality, religion, geography or culture. It was to this challenge, Seriot argues, that the structuralist ideas of the Prague Circle sought to provide an answer. The intellectual work of Trubetskoi, Jakobson and Savitskii was oriented towards discovering and elucidating the deep, primordial structures that gave form to the geo-cultural space of Eurasia. And it was for this reason that the ontological dimension of Prague structuralism was of such importance, linking, as it did, the methodological and epistemological categories of structuralist thought to the geopolitical project of Eurasianism.

While Eurasianists drew from a variety of social sciences to argue for the singularity of the Eurasian cultural organism, Seriot is primarily concerned with the movement's interest in linguistics as it is here that these intellectuals had their greatest influence on European thought. The notion of the Sprachbund or ‘language union’ is of particular importance in this regard, not least because it would go on to have particular import for the future history of phonology. The theory of the language union sought to draw attention to and explain the linguistic similarities across languages brought about through geographic proximity. It was a theory that set out to challenge genetic theories of historical filiation, stressing the phonological hybridisation that took place between genetically unrelated languages and de-emphasising genealogical hypotheses. The purpose of this theory was to offer linguistic ‘evidence’ for the existence of a Eurasian system, a system whose outlines immediately dissolved when observed through a genetic framework: ‘This was a vast project for blurring or transcending established genetic borders so as to generate new, even more impenetrable dividing lines’ (64). The notion of the language union, that is, prioritised the importance of shared geography in the mutual convergence of different languages and was ideally placed to give scientific substance to ideas of a Eurasian cultural organism.

That structuralist linguistics, or, at least, a significant thread of it, should develop as part of a project to demarcate the foundations of an imagined Eurasia, is a fact rarely acknowledged in existing intellectual histories. However, as Seriot makes clear, this connection is more than simply a curious historical anecdote; rather, the ties between Prague structuralism and Eurasianist thought point to a deeper conceptual rift between the structuralist ideas of Saussure and his French inheritors and those of Trubetskoi, Jakobson and Savitskii (251). In effect, the text asks us to reconsider whether ‘structuralism’ was a single, uniform movement at all, or whether intellectual historians have retroactively ascribed to it a cross-European coherence.

IV

In the same vein as Seriot, Michael Gubser's The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics and Social Renewal in Central Europe is a comprehensive history of Central European phenomenology that recovers Eastern European thinkers in order to reorganise and rethink our dominant understandings of this influential philosophical movement. The central misconception in the existing literature at which the author takes aim is the claim that phenomenology, particularly ‘in its Husserlian Urform. . .has long been discounted as esoteric or solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the lonely rational mind’ (1). While recognising that the school certainly drew from its founders a specialised, obscure and at times even elitist language, Gubser insists that ethical and social engagement lay at its heart.

The work's primary concern is to bring into closer dialogue the ideas of twentieth century German, Austrian, Czech and Polish philosophers to demarcate what Gubser argues is a distinct, native tradition of ‘Central European’ phenomenology. This specific tradition is characterised by several properties, including a primary commitment to Husserl's philosophical system over Heidegger's later ontological innovations; a tendency towards Christian themes and priorities; a concern with defining and promoting a distinctly ‘European’ legacy; and, most significantly, a commitment to ‘worldly engagement’ (6–10). It is this Central European tradition, he maintains, that has generally tended to be overlooked in wider discussions of the social or ethical life of phenomenology.Footnote ⁸ In so defining its object of study as Central Europe, Gubser at once attempts to dissolve the ‘wall’ between Eastern and Western Europe, but at the same time insist on the distinct contributions of Eastern European thinkers to this tradition. Indeed, the incorporation of Eastern European philosophers, such as the Czech dissident Jan Patočka and Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, is a unique and welcome contribution to the field. It is precisely in their post-war writings, composed in response to the imposition of communist rule in the region, that Central European phenomenology was most explicitly anchored in ethical and social themes, seeking political or social change through an ethical renewal of the subject and its wider community (4–6).

The work is broken into two sections that are both geographically and periodically defined. The first deals primarily with phenomenology in the pre-Second World War German-speaking world, beginning in the late nineteenth century with the fathers of the science, Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl and concluding with the philosophical activism of Husserl's students on the eve of war. But it is the second section of the book, which shifts our attention eastward, into the post-war period and the rebirth of a socially-oriented phenomenology in opposition to the socialist states of the Eastern Bloc that most interests this reviewer. Gubser's chief focus here is the dissident philosophical milieu of Czechoslovakia and Poland, although we are introduced in passing to thinkers in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Existing historical accounts of Eastern European dissident thought have tended to operate through the paradigms set out during the Cold War, which associates Eastern European dissidence with the traditions of Western liberalism. Taking aim at this approach, Gubser instead encourages us to view these thinkers within a native philosophical tradition that often stood at odds with the goals and priorities of liberalism.

The book's central contribution in this regard is its identification of a shared set of phenomenological concerns that run throughout post-war Eastern European thought, bringing together movements traditionally viewed as in tension with one another, whether Marxist or anti-communist, secular or neo-Thomist. Chapter six provides an overview of Marxist humanist thought during the period of de-Stalinisation (1956–1968) and the Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas that underpinned the work of figures such as Karel Kosik, Gyorgy Lukacs or the Praxis school of Yugoslavia (134–135).Footnote ⁹ The following chapter offers an in-depth study of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, whose work has received renewed attention in the Anglophone world in recent years.Footnote ¹⁰ Through a careful reading of his work, Gubser argues that Patočka's critique of the Stalinist system understood it to be a particularly egregious manifestation of a much broader modern European tendency towards dry rationalism and a fascination for technological development. In this sense, both communism and capitalism were part of the same European ‘cult of domination’ that had its roots in the forgetting of a more ethical and spiritual way of being in the world. A subsequent chapter draws the parallels between Patočka's phenomenological concerns for the modern European ‘soul’ and the work of Karol Wojtyla, whose interest in phenomenology was in its promise to provide a more rigorous ethical and social dimension to Catholic neo-Thomism.

Throughout each of these chapters, Gubser's overarching aim is to clearly demarcate Eastern European dissident thought from the liberalism with which it came to be identified following 1989: ‘Since the 1980s, our social and political vision has narrowed considerably, with a righteous liberalism as the only widely available social and political discourse. East European dissidents, selectively misunderstood, have been conscripted as agents of this liberal triumph. They would have shuddered at the role’ (229).Footnote ¹¹ For Gubser, these were not Eastern European iterations of a Western liberalism, but rather articulations of a longer tradition of phenomenological thought that reached beyond the wall to encompass all of Central Europe. Not only does this perspective offer us a more precise and contextualised appreciation for post-war dissident ideas in Czechoslovakia and Poland, it also enriches our understanding of European phenomenology more broadly.

V

The concern with re-examining the legacy of dissident thought in Eastern Europe is also a key topic in Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex Oushakine's edited collection, In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia. However, where Gubser's work sought to explicitly challenge the liberal appropriation of post-war dissidents, this collection stages a debate between, on the one hand, scholars intent on consciously and confidently asserting the liberal values of dissident thought and those looking to critique, bracket or decentre this narrative, on the other. Intellectual history is a particularly important field in which to explore these debates. As the editors acknowledge in their introductory remarks, the relationship between philosophy and politics is an especially intimate one for Eastern Europe and Russia owing, in large part, to the legacy of communism. ‘Long before becoming a political project’, they remind us, ‘communism started as a philosophical idea’ (1). This imbrication of politics and philosophy was compounded by the prominent role intellectuals played in the various opposition movements that confronted the communist states of the region. Both the state and its dissidents, that is, operated through political discourses framed by consciously philosophical projects. Given the central role that philosophy came to play in socialist Eastern Europe, it should be of little surprise that the field of intellectual history is especially sensitive to debates regarding the legacy of socialism and its dissidents.

For several contributors the question of what we might call the ‘politics of authenticity’ lies at the heart of the legacy of dissident thought and its struggle with the socialist state. In her study of dissident philosophies of language in late-socialist Czechoslovakia, Veronika Tuckerova conducts a sustained critique of Richard Rorty's theory of language and truth. Framing her work as a defence of dissident thought and its continued relevance today, Tuckerova argues that Rorty's insistence on the relativity of truth mirrors that of the states of late socialism and, ‘in effect’ leads him into ‘apologizing for totalitarianism of the left’ (107). Favourably citing the Czech philosophers Petr Fidelius and Vaclav Havel as counterpoints to Rorty, Tuckerova defends an ‘authentic’ ‘ordinary language’ developed by these dissidents in opposition to the allegedly inauthentic ‘totalitarian language’ or, as she terms it, ‘gobbledygook’ practiced by socialist states (95). A similar argument is conducted by the political theorist Vladimir Tismaneanu, whose chapter aims to account for the perseverance of ‘Leninism’ in the post-socialist period.Footnote ¹² The pervasiveness of authoritarian, ethno-nationalist discourses, he argues, points to the continued influence of this model of politics in Eastern Europe. And it is only by regaining the ‘authenticity of existence’ identified by dissident thinkers of the late-socialist period that this political logic might be overcome (238). Both Tuckerova and Tismaneanu point to the seemingly self-evident idea of ‘authenticity’ as a legacy of dissident thought that continues to have relevance for the post-socialist period.

In an essay that seems to be responding to both Tuckerova and Tismaneanu, Ivars Ijabs offers quite a different reading of this ‘politics of authenticity’. For Ijabs, the specific notion of authenticity as advocated by dissident figures such as Havel is largely responsible for the rise of post-socialist authoritarianism. In a careful comparison between Havel and Charles Taylor, Ijabs contrasts Taylor's community-centred notion of authenticity with the transcendental moralism that lies at the root of Havel's thought. This transcendental morality, he argues, precludes inter-subjective dialogue and produces a destructive political climate in which debate and discussion are replaced with absolute moral gestures. Channelling the post-socialist appropriation of this moral politics by the populist right, Ijabs declares: ‘There is no need for dialogue with these groups, be they gays, ethnic minorities or ex-communists – just as during the communist period a dialogue with the clearly inhuman communist state was regarded as morally problematic and undesirable.. . .Basic liberal principles. . .cannot compete with the sweeping, heartfelt moral ambition of “authentic” populist projects’ (257). The rise of post-socialist authoritarianism, therefore, is not the result of the perseverance of political regimes, so much as an anachronistic persistence on the moral notion of ‘authenticity’ itself.Footnote ¹³

Ijabs is not the only contributor to throw into question the legacy of dissident thought in Eastern Europe. In her essay, Nataša Kovačević explores the orientalist discourse of the anti-communist writers Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera. Far from uncritically celebrating these figures, Kovačević highlights the orientalist tropes they used to construct the Eastern European space as backwards, unenlightened or otherwise primitive.Footnote ¹⁴ This orientalism, she argues, buttressed ‘western Cold War discourses that combine cultural racism with political and geographic hierarchies, associating democracy with the West and communism/ authoritarianism with the East’ (132). Elena Gapova's excellent piece analysing the class formation of the post-Soviet intelligentsia also invites us to take a more critical perspective on dissident thought. Deploying a sociological assessment of the contemporary Belorussian opposition movement, Gapova builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Ivan Szeleny to show how intellectuals used their participation in this movement to ‘discursively [translate their] epistemological hegemony into the right for political power’ (212). Appreciating the (often unconscious) class interests that shape the formation of intellectual groupings is central, she concludes, if we are to understand the historical emergence and contemporary role of the post-Soviet intelligentsia. Taken together, both essays break with the traditional hagiography of the figure of the dissident; in a more politically-targeted way, their arguments echo Gubser's and together point to a gradual fracturing of the narrative of a ‘triumphant liberalism’ that has dominated the bulk of post-1989 historiography.

VI

In what ways does the recovery and inclusion of Eastern European thinkers challenge the assumptions of European intellectual history more broadly? The first point that we must note is that each of the texts examined here highlight the fascinating and, for the most part, unexplored philosophical, cultural and scientific work undertaken East of the Elbe in the twentieth century. Far from being a great blank space beyond the wall, Eastern Europe was home to thriving and distinct traditions of thought that engaged with Western European intellectuals in creative and productive ways. Furthermore, the inclusion of these zones of intellectual activity forces historians to reconsider existing narratives currently dominant in the field. The research examined above merely scratches the surface of how established historiography might be further challenged. In the case of structuralism, Seriot's work exposes the multiple and contradictory intellectual genealogies that pose significant challenges for our ability to consider this philosophy a uniform and coherent European movement. Gubser's attempt to delimit the contours of a distinctly Central European phenomenology at once undermines existing accounts of the school's ‘aloofness’ from social or ethical concerns and severs the anachronistic association of Eastern European dissidence with Western liberalism. While Sayer's rich exploration of Prague's intellectual life sheds important light on the history of surrealism as a pan-European cultural movement whose political and social meaning varied across different national contexts.

But the inclusion of Eastern Europe within European intellectual history has the potential to offer an even more significant contribution to our conception of the field. Given the specific ways in which Eastern Europe has been constructed in the Western imaginary as ‘backwards’ and ‘underdeveloped’, each of these works also engages, however obliquely, with a broader notion of modernity and its meaning in European history. What did it mean to participate in and contribute to European thought in a space that has traditionally been seen as the ‘margins’ of the modern? How did Eastern European thinkers approach a discourse of modernity that constructed their own intellectual milieu as ‘backwards’? This concern comes to the fore in Sayer's book, which explicitly sets out to demonstrate the ways in which Prague's intellectuals deconstructed the grand narratives of modernity. The roots of postmodernism, it might be argued, do not lie in the philosophy of post- ‘68 Paris or the artistic circles of 1970s New York, but precisely in the ‘marginalised’ intellectual world of interwar Prague. Indeed, Sayer's argument seems to be that it was precisely this marginalisation that produced such a postmodern perspective, offering Prague intellectuals a means of playfully and ironically distancing themselves from the grand narratives that continued to determine the horizons of Western and Soviet intellectuals until well into the Cold War.

In a similar way, several of the essays from Bradatan and Oushakine's collection encourage us to break with the teleological narratives that see Eastern European dissidents as trailing behind an older and more established Western liberalism and the events of 1989 as a ‘return’ to European modernity. This is also one of the sharpest contributions of Michael Gubser's recovery of post-war Eastern European philosophers, whose development of the wider Central European tradition of ‘worldly phenomenology’ was to extend the critique of European modernity to the system of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism. By so breaking with Cold War paradigms, both these works offer important critiques of liberal notions of progress, development, modernity and the attendant discourse of ‘transition’, which marks the space of Eastern Europe as ‘backwards’ or ‘lagging’ behind its Western cousin.

Although Seriot's engagement with the concept of modernity is more oblique than the other texts examined here, as a historian of science his work necessarily evokes the teleological assumptions of modernity as the process of progressive, unimpeded enlightenment. Indeed, key to his discussion of the Prague Circle's structuralism is the broader question of the universal application of particular scientific paradigms. Can we speak of a distinctly ‘Russian’ science of linguistics and, if so, what relation does this bear to ‘Western’ sciences that claim for themselves the sole mantle of truth? This question takes on distinct significance in the Eastern European context owing to the anxieties of ‘backwardness’ in relation to Western Europe. Partly in response to these anxieties, Prague structuralists and the contemporary heirs of their work set out to establish their own distinctly ‘Russian’ linguistic science, with its own priorities. For Seriot, what is at stake in this debate is not whether the ‘Western’ or the ‘Russian’ linguistic paradigm was more scientifically ‘modern’, but rather the ways in which geo-political divisions and cultural anxieties regarding Russian and Eastern European ‘backwardness’ came to shape the epistemologies and methodologies of the Prague School's structuralism.

The various ways in which the above texts critique or skew the notion of modernity highlight that the recovery and inclusion of Eastern Europe within European intellectual history promises more than simply buttressing or complementing existing narratives in the field. Rather, it forces scholars to reconsider many of their historical assumptions regarding both specific philosophical or cultural movements, but also the meaning, significance and even integrity of certain master-concepts around which the field has long been organised.