Totalitní tradice v české politice

• Authors: Jan Holzer

Title variants

EN

Totalitarian Traditions in Czech Politics

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

Prompted by Havelka’s having raised the question of a totalitarian era in the Bohemian Lands after 1939, the author of the present contribution asks why Communist rule was so easily established in Czechoslovakia. He does not question that this system was indeed totalitarian. The fact that Czech society did not offer much resistance to Communism and that its retrospective view of the Communist era is not altogether negative is, according to Holzer, accounted for by a specifi cally Czech traditional conception of politics. Holzer identifies a tendency, which emerged in the nineteenth century, to conceive politics as the realization of certain moral and national imperatives and to reject an openly negotiated compromise between conflicting social interests, favouring national unity instead. Moreover, Czech society twice – after 1918 and after the 1945–48 period – radically altered its system of values and perceptions. The author proposes a scholarly, interdisciplinary evaluation of Czech political tradition, arguing that there is no alternative if one wishes to prevent a return to totalitarian rule.

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
• Year: 2009
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 664-673

Contributors

author

Jan Holzer

• Soudobé dějiny, redakce, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v.v.i., Vlašská 9, 118 40 Praha 1, Czech Republic