Over the last 27 years developments in the former “second world” have attracted a lot of attention, and yet some aspects of post-communism remain understudied. One of them is the impact of ideas, ideologies, and intellectual traditions on post-communist politics. Opinions on the subject usually oscillate between two extremes. According to some authors, virtually everything that transpired in Eastern Europe after 1989 should be linked to “neoliberalism” (a term amply used but rarely defined) and therefore analyses of post-communist transformation should focus on the alleged depravities of this particular ideology. According to other scholars, ideas mattered little if at all: their accounts focus on the matrixes of incentives self-interested elites faced, the political calculus guiding politicians’ actions, and the consequences of post-communist rulers’ utility-maximizing behavior. What has been largely absent from the literature are interpretations of post-communism that avoid the crude simplicities and polemical obsessiveness that characterize run-of-the-mill critiques of “neoliberalism” while shedding analytical light on the ideational dimension of post-communist politics.

It is this lacuna that Thinking Through Transition seeks to fill—the shared objective of the 24 authors who contributed to this volume is to write “the intellectual history of the transition period” (p. 2). The significance of such a project is satisfactorily explained by the editors in their introduction: it might incite “cross-disciplinary dialogues” that illuminate “local and regional contexts as well as the longue durée dynamics of political ideas . . . their genealogies, transfers and creative adaptations” (p. 2) and deepen our understanding of “the peculiarities of social, cultural and intellectual” settings in which post-communist transformations unfolded (p. 7), as well as “the specificity of cultural discourses and political configurations” (p. 17). The editors also acknowledge, however, that accomplishing these laudable objectives won’t be easy. They assert that “intellectual history is by definition a hermeneutic discipline” (p. 19) and thus create the impression that the chapters’ authors will squarely confront the difficult task of crafting evidence-based and analytically dexterous interpretations of the possible meanings of key texts, rhetorical styles and performative practices. The editors also identify the kinds of errors that frequently derail the efforts of intellectual historians: “the trap of politicized language of current political conflict” should be “avoided” (p. 3); “the temporality of the history of ideas” should not “parallel political history, which is event-driven” (p. 19); a “critical distance” from the discussed period should be maintained (p. 34). Clearly, “the intellectual history of the transition period” might be compellingly delineated only if such pitfalls are studiously eschewed.

The book consists of 19 chapters (several are coauthored) divided in five sections (Liberalism, Conservatism, Populism, The Left, and The Politics of History). It purports to elucidate ideational trends in different historical periods (some chapters are devoted solely to post-communism; others to post-communism and communism; and still others to post-communism, communism. and the pre-war era), to analyze an array of issues (including the content of popular journals, polemical exchanges in the media, and specific policies), and to establish how ideas molded interactions between important actors (public intellectuals, party leaders, and cultural elites). Undoubtedly, the quality of some chapters is high, e.g., Camil Alexandru Pârvu’s analytically-sophisticated study of Romanian populism and Rafał Matyja’s in-depth explorations of Polish conservatism. But even sympathetic readers might reach the conclusion that this ambitious endeavor is marred by problems—some relatively minor, some very serious.

Among the minor problems are a lack of geographical balance and redundancy. Some countries, like Romania, are covered in one chapter; and to some, like Serbia and Croatia, even less space is allocated: both are analyzed in a single chapter. As a result, their “intellectual history” has remained largely unwritten. In contrast, five chapters are devoted to Hungary—and in those there are considerable overlaps: sometimes they focus on the same events and feature an identical cast of characters (two of the chapters contain biographical sketches of the same person, Gáspár Miklós Tamás). Another minor defect is inadequate editing: many chapters contain passages whose exact meaning is hard to fathom. Two examples should suffice. In a chapter on Poland one encounters the claim that Solidarity became “a classical trade union with a vindictive approach to worker-employer relations” (p. 94). Some readers might have no problem figuring out what “a classical trade union” is, and why “vindictiveness” should be listed among its essential characteristics—but many might. In a chapter on the Czech Republic young Leftists are mentioned who “do not seem to accept the liberal consensus on socialism as ‘a death forever’ or in the best case as ‘a set of values,’ but they seem to look for a new systematic alternative towards capitalism” (p. 428). This sentence might be conveying important messages—that there exists a “liberal consensus on socialism as ‘death forever,’” that “in the best case” socialism is “a set of values,” that certain Leftists are “systematically” pushing their societies “towards capitalism—but they demand a very strenuous deciphering.

A more debilitating drawback is that the analytical content of key terms is never explained. The decision to organize four of the sections around “more or less conventional groupings of political traditions” (p. 19)—liberalism, conservatism, populism, and the Left—might seem uncontroversial. But it does create interpretative conundrums: what do such general analytical categories mean when applied to East European realities? This question is not cogently addressed, and as a result many chapters are littered with perplexing interpretative claims. For example, what should we make of the contention that the main champion of conservatism in Hungary in the mid-1990s was “a socialist-liberal coalition” which practiced something called “consensualism” (p. 244)? This amalgam of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and consensualism is not easy to unpack analytically. Then the reader comes across the statement that the main idea embraced by Czech conservatives after 1989 was that “society is a tabula rasa, and a ready-made concept of a new social, economic, political and moral order could be imprinted on it” (p. 180) and is left wondering: isn’t that the epitome of what thinkers as different as Joseph de Maistre and William F. Buckley, Jr., set themselves against?

The section on liberalism repeatedly demonstrates that the question “based on what criteria should we determine what is ‘liberal’ in a post-communist context” remains mystifyingly complex. If this issue is carefully scrutinized as it is in The Meaning of Liberalism, East and West, a book published by Central European Press in 2000 and edited by Zdenĕk Suda and Jiři Musil—and unmentioned in this volume—then the term might be productively used. Alas, in this book it is not, which is why its use at times creates more confusion than enlightenment.

For example, the chapter on Hungarian liberalism is structured around analysis of publications that appeared in the journal Beszélő. That Beszélő was a revered dissident publication is a well-known fact; but was it a liberal publication? There might be very persuasive affirmative answers to this question—but they are not provided here. Instead, the author discusses five contributors, one of whom “frequently emphasized his dedication to democratic and plebeian forms of Hungarian patriotis,” (p. 62), another one was apparently more worried about “the weakness of the post-communist left” than the propagation of liberal ideals (p. 55), and a third one valued “stylistic liberality, anti-political attitudes and intellectual expertise” (p. 71). What any of that has to do with liberalism is unclear.

Similarly confounding is the chapter on Czech liberalism. Its main argument is that “the Czech liberal tradition . . . perished under the new democratic conditions after 1990 and was overwhelmed by the new political tradition of liberalism of the New Right” (p.111). The author has credibly identified the poor Desdemona featured in this tragic story—“the Czech liberal tradition” associated with Masaryk (pp. 113–117). But it is not obvious who the muscular Othello that strangled her actually is. Why is the label “liberalism” attached to “the New Right”? What is “New” and “Right” about it? What does it mean to say that “liberalism” is both “new”—and also simultaneously part of “a political tradition”? The chapter raises these issues but does not shed analytical light on them.

In sum, the volume is plagued by a certain lack of analytical precision that hampers the authors’ effort to dissect the role of liberal, conservative, and populist ideas in the intellectual history of post-communism.

But the two gravest problems with this volume are that the editors’ warning not to confuse intellectual with political history has been ignored—and that their plea for more “hermeneutics” has elicited no response.

The post-communist transformations have generated a lot of pain, and all political actors, parties, and elite constituencies without exception share the responsibility for that. Understandably, writings on the subject are at times permeated by anger and the desire to assign blame. Still, it is debatable whether scholars whose ambition is to write intellectual history should construe their effort as a refighting of the political battles of the recent past—which is what many of the contributors have chosen to do. The “temporality” around which most chapters are structured is almost entirely “political”: the narratives predictably move from the round-table talks of 1989–1990 to the first multi-party elections to the “reforms” and dislocations of the 1990s to the revamping of political landscapes in the 2000s, and analytical attention is lavished on storylines involving the rise and fall of different parties, sectarian squabbles, and intellectuals’ reactions to specific events. Moreover, arguments like the one that in post-1989 Poland “the liberals betrayed the workers” (p. 106) demonstrate that the caveat that “the politicized language of current political conflict” should be avoided has been completely disregarded. The question, then, is: how helpful are such arguments to those who wish to understand “the specificity of cultural discourses” in Eastern Europe? If you are told that Jung “betrayed” Freud or Heidegger “betrayed” Husserl, how much will your grasp of the intellectual history of psychoanalysis or phenomenology improve? Those inclined to answer “not a whole lot” will have a hard time figuring out how stories about treacherous liberals are supposed to illuminate the intellectual history of post-communism.

Finally, the editors’ assertion that “an intellectual history is by definition a hermeneutic discipline” has been overlooked by the contributors. Hermeneutics is not an easy endeavor. As its most influential practitioners have repeatedly pointed out, it engenders heuristically important results only if some very difficult analytical challenges are squarely confronted. Quentin Skinner argues that the conditions necessary for understanding different utterances must be scrupulously specified; Reinhart Koselleck insists that the dimension of interplay between speaking and acting within which historical events occur must be duly mapped; Luc Ferry and Alain Renault assert that distinct “logics of interpretation” must be grounded in a clearly articulated theory of the point of view from which a particular research project will be conducted; Hans-Georg Gadamer maintains that the multidimensional task of reconstructing and recombining meanings must be successfully accomplished. But insofar as projects like the one under review are concerned, arguably the most important challenge is related to what Charles Taylor called “the hermeneutic circle” (the key text is his essay “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” which appears in the second volume in his Philosophical Papers published by Cambridge University Press in 1985). What Taylor means by that is that meanings that are embedded into unfamiliar contexts can only be explained with reference to meanings that are recognizable because embedded in more familiar contexts. In other words, hermeneutic intelligibility can only be achieved if a common language is found. As Taylor demonstrates, this language may be either the product of serious, complex, painstaking scholarly work—or conjure up instantly identifiable but also analytically vapid and interpretatively profoundly misleading terms.

Here is, then, the most serious shortcoming of this book: in the absence of any serious hermeneutical analyses, the intellectual history of post-communism is rendered intelligible through the use of a neat dichotomy, “Left” and “Right” (a term—as some of the quotes mentioned above indicate—which is indiscriminately used throughout the volume to illustrate what liberals, conservatives, and populists stand for). The bulk of this collection of essays is devoted to decrying “the Right’s” alleged acts of depredation and examining “the Left’s” alleged acts of resistance. If accounts of such acts are deleted from this book, there will be very, very little left. The problem is, however, that if one’s ambition is to come to grips with the issues dividing post-communist voters, political leaders, and intellectuals, then categories like “Right” and “Left” are not particularly useful. In a brilliant essay on the post-communist Kulturkapmf, Balázs Trencsényi explains that there exist “powerful similarities between the post-transition conservatives and the “new left” who both question the legitimacy of the transition elites, depict neoliberalism as their principal enemy, and seek to offer an alternative to what they perceive as a pervasive moral and socioeconomic crisis caused by the transformation.” It is one of the contextual peculiarities of post-communism, therefore, that the Right-vs.-Left matrix fails to generate much information about who disagrees with whom about what and why. Of course, analysts could use the matrix in order to integrate the intellectual history of Eastern Europe into an epic Lyotard-esque grand narrative that seeks to explicate the essence of modern political conflict. But then the distinctiveness and complexities of post-communism as a context will recede into the background: the explanatory propositions this narrative will generate will be grounded not in the knowledge of specific circumstances but in a general theory that purports to capture context-transcending regularities that transpire irrespectively of time and place. Alternatively, analysists could explore precisely post-communism’s distinctiveness and complexities, in which case they will have to recognize that the over-reliance on terms like Right and Left might push inquiries into interpretative cul-de-sacs.

This book’s readers are destined to experience disappointments, but there is one benefit they will derive: a clearer understanding of how peculiarly “intellectual history” in Eastern Europe has evolved and how radically the intellectual landscape in the region has changed after 1989. Back in the early 1990s only diehard Stalinists would dissent from the view that a conversation about communism’s crimes is absolutely necessary and that therefore victims should be not only allowed but also encouraged to tell their stories. Of course, the fact that politicians might opportunistically try to sway the conversation and misuse the stories was duly acknowledged. But the consensus was that such concerns cannot override the imperative of coming to terms with the cruelties perpetrated under the old regime (and it was this consensus that inspired a myriad of scholarly projects, from Tzvetan Todorov’s study of the Bulgarian Gulag to István Rév’s work on what he described as “the deeply buried traces of the 1956 Revolution” in Hungary to the Tismăneanu Commission in Romania). The final section of this volume is devoted to “The Politics of History” and it culminates with a chapter that shows how dramatically this consensus has eroded. The author relentlessly assaults newly established research institutes in Eastern Europe because their publications menacingly focus on “the criminal features of communist regimes” (p. 561) and their agenda includes activities like “collecting victim testimonies” (p. 566). The problem with such lines of inquiry, he avers, is that they might benefit some political actors more than others: “a crimes-centered memory of communism provides the Right with a competitive political advantage” (p. 586). The solution he offers is that attention should shift to “the more comfortable memories of large swathes of the population that did not directly experience oppression and may have enjoyed the economic security and social predictability of life under communism” (p. 561). Apparently, the idea that scholarly writings on “comfortable memories” might also be abused for partisan purposes has not crossed the author’s mind. But the more important fact here is that today there are intellectual historians in Eastern Europe who seem to believe that research on the traumas of communism’s victims should be discouraged because the proper way to judge the ancien regime is from the vantage point of its beneficiaries, not of those it mercilessly oppressed. It would be tempting to think through the implications of this position for our assessment of the Nuremberg Laws, colonialism, and apartheid, but for students of post-communism the more relevant point is that intellectual positions that recently would have been considered beyond the pale are now rapidly becoming part of the mainstream in Eastern Europe.

The same observation applies to another of the book’s central messages: “the increasing popularity and intellectual infrastructures of the ‘new Left’ in recent years constitutes the promise of the radiant future” (p. 28). Up until 1989, the contention that something called a “radiant future” might come into existence and that a historical agent labeled “the Left” can actually deliver it was quite vogueish among intellectuals based in Berkeley, Paris, and Frankfurt—but vigorously challenged by their counterparts in Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague. East European skeptics drew upon a venerable local tradition of distrusting the utopian visions of “merchants of faith,” as Thomas Ort put it in a fascinating biography of Karel Čapek (published by Palgrave in 2013). They had witnessed how millenarian impulses inevitably induce paralysis of critical thinking and their experience had taught them that the Left’s record of salvationist exertions leaves much to be desired. In fact, it was the rich array of philosophical arguments that East European intellectuals were able to amalgamate in their critique of Western ideas about “the radiant future” that led Barry Smith—editor of yet another book unmentioned in this volume, Philosophy and Political Change in Eastern Europe, published by the Hegler Institute in 1993—to predict that “the centre of gravity of European philosophy is set to move east.” Today we may safely conclude that such a move did not materialize. Something else happened instead: the propositions about “the Left” and “the radiant future” are still fashionable in the West—but are no longer critiqued by the next cohort of East European intellectuals. I submit that there are two ways to think about this convergence of mainstreams. It might be that an essential truth about the nature of modern politics that Western progressives have always embraced has now been recognized in a region where until recently the locals, trapped in their intellectual backwardness, defiantly contested it. Or it might be that, as the global habitus of homo academicus becomes more and more homogenized, some of the most important lessons of the bloody twentieth century are being swiftly pushed into oblivion. Which is it?