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Jan Mertl: sociolog-kolaborant, nebo oběť okolností?

100%
Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2012
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vol. 48
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issue 2
343-366
EN
The article analyses the life and academic contribution of one of the most prominent interwar Czech sociologists, Jan Mertl (1904–1978), whose studies in political sociology studies were highly innovative in his day, in both the Czech and the international context. Mertl was a follower of Max Weber and focused on the comparative historical-sociological analysis of political partisanship and party systems. He also devoted extensive study to changes in the relationship between state administration/bureaucracy and political representation. He enriched the field of (Czech) sociological theory with his concept of the ‘self-regularity of social phenomena’, dealing with the unintended outcomes and latent functions of social action, and he attempted to distinguish between Weberian ideal types and ‘historical types’. He also made the first systematic analysis of modern bureaucracy, using the Weberian concept of the ‚iron cage of modernisation‘. However, Mertl is a significant figure in the history of Czech sociology for another reason: his behaviour during the Second World War is generally perceived as an explicit example of collaboration with Nazism, which led to Mertl’s total exclusion from the academic community after the war. The author analyses the motives and extent of Mertl’s ‘wrongdoing’, as well as the reasons for his being ostracised by the academic world, even though he was officially acquitted of collaboration. The author also provides a brief description of his later life. The article is based on all available published sources and on a large number of previously unknown and unexploited archive materials.
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Sociolog(ie) mezi kolárkem, hákovým křížem a rudou hvězdou: Jaroslav Šíma v dějinách české sociologie

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2011
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vol. 47
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issue 5
967-990
EN
The article analyses the life story and works of a significant, but today sadly almost unknown, Czech sociologist, Jaroslav Šíma (1914–1955). It draws on all the published sources available on him as well as a large number of to date unknown and unexploited archive materials. Šíma became a member of the somewhat “thin on the ground” national sociological academia of the interwar period and specialised in the sociology of sexuality, religion, and education. However, his research was often the result of his own religious and church positions, which were connected with the so-called free Christianity movement and which cannot be accurately judged according to contemporary standards. Šíma’s star rose spectacularly during the Second World War, when he became the undisputed leader of Czech sociology, notwithstanding the fact that his influence came at the price of making considerable compromises with the Nazi regime, and owing to this and his own personal failures he assumed a rather low profi le in the immediate post-war years. Šíma had another opportunity to shine following the communist coup in 1948, when he immersed himself in the ideas of the new regime. Seven years later he committed suicide. The author analyses Šíma’s fate and his writings as a case study in the context of the evolution of Czech sociology and outlines its weak points as well as the events which contributed to the outstanding but unlikely success of this ‘maverick’ of sociology (the discipline’s weak organisational background, with conformity to special interests, personal grudges between top figures in the field, and methodological incompetence flourishing in its place).
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Padesát let české sociologie náboženství na stránkách Sociologického časopisu

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2014
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vol. 50
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issue 5
735-752
EN
The fiftieth anniversary of Sociologický časopis (since 2001 Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review) provides an ideal opportunity to discuss the presence and achievements of the sociology of religion in the most important Czech sociological journal and to contribute to the historical, theoretical, and methodological analysis of Czech sociology of religion itself. The author provides a summary of all the articles, reviews, and information on the topic published in the journal and shows that, regardless of its importance within Czech sociological discourse at the various stages in the development of the discipline, the sociology of religion has generally had only a limited presence in the journal over the years, for both internal (sociologists of religion were not considered ‘core members’ of the sociological community) and external reasons (fear of what was considered a ‘problematic’ topic during the communist era and the non-existence of ‘untarnished’ students of religion after the collapse of the communist regime). The situation changed only recently, broadly speaking in the last decade, as younger generations seized the initiative and research on religion became a standard part of the Czech sociological mainstream. However, only a small number of contemporary sociologists of religion publish articles in the journal and, consequently, this sub-discipline is still far from being a consistent presence in its pages. The limited degree to which Czech sociology of religion has established itself in the pages of Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review thus raises fundamental questions about the nature of the discipline, its students, and the broader sociological environment.
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ČEŠTÍ SOCIOLOGOVÉ V POČÁTCÍCH SLOVENSKÉ SOCIOLOGIE

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociológia (Sociology)
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2013
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vol. 45
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issue 1
27 – 47
EN
The author analyses institutional beginning of Slovak sociology, which was very much influenced by Czech scholars. Earlier, somewhat amateur attempts at establishing a particular Slovak sociological tradition, associated mainly with Ján Lajčiak, were singularly unsuccessful, while members of the so-called Hlas movement (“Hlasists”), who followed Masaryk in the pre-First World War period, preferred politics to academic sociology in the interwar years. Slovak sociology was thus initially represented by Czech scholars employed in Bratislava (Josef Král, Otakar Machotka and Bedřich Vašek) who taught the first Slovak sociologists Peter Gula and Alexander Hirner until the split of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A new Slovak sociological tradition (sociography) was established by former politician with sociological interests Anton Štefánek in the late 1930s and 1940s at which time he remained the only professor of sociology in the Slovak Republic. Although Gula and Hirner were closer to the Prague sociological school and the older Štefánek to the Brno sociological school, there were no significant clashes between these Slovak sociologists. Eventually they created their own sociological tradition, separate from Czech sociology, during the 1940s. It had two centres, which differed theoretically and methodologically, one in Bratislava (Štefánek and his followers including Ignác Gašparec) and another in Martin (Peter Gula, Alexander Hirner).
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"Opustíš-li mne, zahyneš…" : Akademická dráha Otakara Machotky a dalších českých sociologů v emigraci po únoru 1948

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2017
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vol. 53
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issue 5
737-764
EN
This article focuses on Czech sociologists who left Czechoslovakia immediately after the communist coup in February 1948 and their subsequent academic and personal fates in exile. Attention is devoted principally to Otakar Machotka (1899–1970), a prominent figure in both Czech political life and pre-Marxist Czech sociology with strong personal and methodological ties to the Chicago School; this article’s research draws on his correspondence and on other archived sources. Machotka’s special circustances worked to his favour in the United States where he was offered excellent academic positions. However, Machotka was opposed to the sociological mainstream(s) of his time and (unsuccessfully) attempted to establish his own school between sociology and social psychology. After that he accepted a tenured position at a marginal non-research university and failed to gain an audience in wider American or international academia. On a personal level, he preferred to focus on his family and social work rather than to take part in the academic game. In this he was perhaps influenced by the bleak fates of two of his colleagues in exile, František Rouček (1891–1952) and Zdeněk Ullrich (1901–1955), both of whom gave priority to their professional careers, which took them to Africa, where they both met an early death. Members of the youngest cohort of Czech post-February 1948 exiled sociologists, however, enjoyed happier fates, gaining some international academic renown, but only after graduating (anew) from western universities.
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„Šedá zóna“ v éře tzv. normalizace: Dům techniky ČSVTS Pardubice v dějinách české sociologie

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2014
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vol. 50
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issue 1
107-130
EN
The Marxist-Leninist ‘ideological supervision’ of Czech sociology in the 1970s and 1980s led to the de facto academic impotence of ‘official’ institutions at universities and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. However, sociological inquiry and discussion found a home, at least temporarily, in various less regulated departmental, regional and technical institutes, which came to represent the ‘grey zone’ of contemporary Czech sociology, i.e. the space between official, state-sanctioned sociological work and prohibited, dissident sociology (and where a significant number of persecuted sociologists were able to retain their jobs). One such institute, the House of Technology in Pardubice, played a particularly significant role in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, in the 1980s. For a decade after 1969 it hosted the dissolved academic Department of the Sociology of Industry (V. Herstus, O. Sedláček, D. Slejška) and its research activities, the former Institute for Social Analysis (from Hradec Králové), and a further 20–30 external (part-time) workers. The House of Technology conducted around 150 empirical surveys, especially in the fields of the sociology of work and the sociology of organisation and published a number of books in the field of sociology and its own journal, Analýza (Analysis), which in the first few years presented theoretical discussions and later the results of empirical research. In this article the author provides a broad analysis of the organisational background and results of the various activities of the House of Technology, which, whilst significant in terms of Czech sociology at the time, were, the author concludes, unable to serve as an effective substitute for real academic work. Indeed, it was more a research than an academic institution and the main contribution it made to Czech sociology was the professional ‘life jacket’ it offered persecuted scholars.
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Postsekularismus po česku? Ne/religiozita současné české společnosti mezi Východem a Západem

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Nešpor Z. R.
Střed. Časopis pro mezioborová studia Střední Evropy 19. a 20. století. / Centre. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
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2018
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vol. 10
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issue 1
101-118
EN
The article contributes to critical analyses of contemporary European religion and (rather loose) conceptualisations of post-secularism. Return of religion into the public space, which may be called post-secularism, is visible and growing even in predominantly out churched Czech Republic. However, the very concept of post-secularism is too broad to be used as an analytical category. The author thus tries to operationalise it using functional differentiation between (social types of) churches and Davie’s idea of vicarious religion.Using empirical studies on religion, the author outlines the varying public roles of religion and religiosity in contemporary Western and post-Communist European countries, and emphasizes the middle position of the Czech Republic.However, the anomalous position will hardly persist forever. The author is convinced that Czech churches and especially their leaders are currently facing a choice between the Western and Eastern models of public religious life and church-state relations.
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Studium a studenti sociologie v Československu před nástupem komunistického režimu

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2012
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vol. 48
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issue 4
669–696
EN
Czechoslovak sociology was among the first European national sociological traditions to become established institutionally. Lectures in sociology commenced at Charles University in the 1880s, the first professorships and departments of sociology were established in 1919, and sociology was fully established as a doctoral discipline twelve years later. All the other universities in Czechoslovakia (with the notable exception of the German University in Prague) followed suit (usually after five or so ‘test’ years), as did polytechnics and independent colleges specialising in social studies, where, admittedly, attempts to establish departments of sociology were only partly successful. Using archive sources, this article analyses in detail the various processes involved in the establishment of sociology at individual universities and colleges, describes the forms and content of sociological education offered and conducts a prosopographical analysis of students in this field. On average, five students graduated in sociology in Czechoslovakia each year during the interwar period, and the number of dissertations written in sociology experienced a real boom shortly after the Second World War. The number of annual graduates rose to 23 between 1945 and 1948 and to 42 between 1948 and 1953, and this despite the fact that after the coup in 1948 the communist regime declared sociology a ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’. Consequently, only a very small number (5 percent) of the post-coup graduates were able to apply their sociological knowledge in their careers, and most of those who were able to did so rather late in their careers; the great majority of earlier graduates were not allowed to apply their knowledge at all. However, in Czechoslovakia it was nothing new for graduates of sociology to be unable to apply their education in their field, since the interwar and immediate post-war academic elites were made up largely of graduates of other fields, who were often unwilling to make room in academia for their younger colleagues.
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Bible českých evangelíků v „dlouhém“ 19. století

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Nešpor Z. R.
Historie – Otázky – Problémy (History, Issues, Problems)
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2013
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vol. 5
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issue 2
107-117
EN
The Protestants are considered to be the “people of Scripture”, for whom frequent lay Bible reading is taken as a matter of course. In their endeavours to learn divine law they were unable to make do with the legacy of the Reformation, let alone the older church tradition. Both of these were supposed to be countered by the high frequency of publication of new Czech Bible translations during the “long” 19th century, when the modern Protestant churches were established. However, quite the opposite is the case. The publication of Czech Protestant Bibles was for the most part taken into the care of the British and Foreign Bible Society and for a long time these were mere reprints of the third Halle Bible and the later Kralice Bible. The reasons for this can be found in the nature of Czech Tolerance Protestantism, including the fact that up until that time a number of pre‑White Mountain or exile Bibles (e.g. the Halle and the Pressburg Bibles) had survived and continued to be used. The only exceptions to this throughout the “long” 19th century are Růžičkaʼs Jubilee Bible (1863) and the Karafiát revision of the Kralice translation (1915), which are presented in greater detail in this article. An analysis is also made of the discussions at the time over their publication, as documented by the Czech Protestant journals and other sources from that period.
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Modernizace českého evangelického prostředí: případ svobodných církví

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Nešpor Z. R.
Český časopis historický (The Czech Historical Review)
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2012
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vol. 110
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issue 1
20-51
EN
Protestant churches permitted under the Patent of Toleration issued by Joseph II (i.e. the Lutherans and the Calvinists) remained on the outskirts of Czech society with the exception of the Aš (German: Asch) region and the Těšín Silesia (German: Teschener Schlesien). Only after the Protestants achieved equal rights (the Protestant Provisorium 1849, the Protestant Patent 1861), their churches began to expand numerically and had a social and cultural impact. Indeed, their activities from the end of the 19th century until World War II considerably exceeded their relatively small numbers. Simultaneously, alternative „free“ evangelical churches emerged in the second half of the 19th century (the reconstituted Unity of the Brethren, the Free Reformed Church, the Baptists, the Adventists and others), or even Old Catholics. Small churches represented an alternative for Protestants dissatisfied with the functioning of „people‘s“ churches and their deeper religiosity, which often had sectarian features, also appealed, to a degree, to converts from the Roman Catholic environment. The growth in numbers and importance of Protestants in the Czech Lands was linked with nationalist movements and nationalist-confessional links which emerged in the German speaking environment as early as the 1860s and in the Czech and Polish environments in the period around World War I and in its wake. These processes can be understood as manifestations of modernisation in Protestant communities, partially coming from abroad, which led to theological liberalism (in the case of Czech speaking Protestants, but with an „inter-phase“ of confessionalism). Contrary to that, small Evangelical churches took the path of Enlightenment criticism of theological liberalism, which, however, was based on no less – although different – modernist principles.
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Baťov 1940 – první český empiricky podložený výzkum v oblasti sociologie práce

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2015
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vol. 51
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issue 2
279-298
EN
There is a forgotten chapter in (history of) the Czech sociology of work. In the early 1940s, an empirical study was conducted by Otakar Machotka among employees of the Bata company in Batov (today Otrokovice). One of the leading figures of early Czech sociology, Machotka saw the closure of Czech universities during the Second World War as an opportunity to carry out original empirical research devoted to the sociological analysis of the workforce and consisting of a study of the social determination of work efficiency. This was the first Czech, and one of only a very few European, empirically-grounded research projects in the sociology of work and occupation that had been conducted to that time. Machotka statistically analysed the vast data sets collected by the company’s personnel department and provided a detailed interpretation of the outcomes, while remaining very much aware of the limitations of the results and the methods employed. He formulated hypotheses about how the age gap between spouses, the number of children in family, and other characteristics might impact (various aspects of) work efficiency, and reformulated existing hypotheses about the impact of siblings, marital status, and parental profession. Machotka also helped to theoretically and methodologically (re)orientate the sociology of work and occupations. Machotka subsequently abandoned this topic and quantitative sociology in general, perhaps in part as a result of the above-described research, which, the author suggests, led him to realise that ‘abstract empiricism’ was not the only method on which to base social studies.
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Miloslav Petrusek ve světle své publikační činnosti v samizdatovém Sociologickém obzoru

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Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2014
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vol. 50
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issue 2
189-210
EN
The late Miloslav Petrusek (1936–2012) was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of Czech sociology. He was one of a few sociologists who revived the discipline in the 1960s and was a talented organiser and a co-founder of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in the 1990s. He was also a gifted teacher. However, owing to his busy organisational role, extensive teaching activities, and the publishing ban and restrictions he was subject to during the communist era, it is difficult to define the ‘real Petrusek’ in terms of his sociological thinking. The author argues that insight into his thought can, paradoxically, be found in the work he did during the most restricted period of his life, i.e. in the late 1980s, when Petrusek and his colleague Josef Alan published Sociologický obzor (Sociological Horizon), probably the only samizdat sociological journal in the world (1987–1989). In this journal Petrusek was not bound by external restrictions or his various other activities and he proved to be a particularly original analyst and thinker. He defined an ‘alternative sociology’, which was based primarily on the sociological analysis of literature and the performing arts as well as on his own profound knowledge of classical and contemporary sociology, which allowed him to shed light on a range of pressing contemporary social issues such as gender relations, the social perception of time and progress, the dissemination and dissolution of higher education, social stratification, and the approaching post-communist era. Petrusek contributed 83 different and, in the main, highly valued texts to Sociologický obzor that often drew attention to the crucial social issues of late modernisation (not only in reference to communist societies) and criticised the academic impotence of the ‘official’ Marxist-Leninist sociology of the time.
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Sto let Českobratrské církve evangelické a Církve československé (husitské) : náboženské organizace, společenská poptávka a racionalita řízení

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Nešpor Z. R., Miller S.
Český časopis historický (The Czech Historical Review)
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2018
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vol. 116
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issue 4
1059-1078
EN
The article analyses organisational development of two main established non-Catholic churches in the Czech Lands, i.e. the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren (Českobratrská církev evangelická) and the Czechoslovak (Hussite) Church (Církev československá /husitská/), since their establishment in 1918 and 1920 to the present. Author shows that particular congregations were established more or less according to public demand in the first decades, but the structure of the churches remained in large degree stable, with just a little reaction to growing secularization and religious differentiation (including spatial) in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The path dependency was even deeper in case of higher organization entities, Protestant seniorates and Hussite dioceses, that hardly respond to regional differences in religiosity. The two “modern” denominations starting with distinct flexibility in comparison with the Roman Catholic Church (mostly at expenses of the very church), have become quite conservative in their organisations in few decades, and as such they are not able to compete with smaller, nonconformist denominations nowadays.
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Dvojí život historické antropologie: interdisciplinární (ne)porozumění mezi historiky, sociology a sociálními antropology

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Nešpor Z. R.
Dějiny - Teorie - Kritika (History - Theory - Criticism)
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2005
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vol. 2
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issue 1
87-104
EN
Since 1989 modern western methodological approaches, including historical anthropology, have been adopted in Czech academic circles, both spontaneously (among historians) and in institutionalised from (the case of ethnology). Very often, however, historical anthropology has been taken up only as an external label that has not meant any real change in research methods. This has simply encouraged the replication ofthe formal and informal ties and institutions inside the academic community that originated in the period of “normalisation” and that undermine the possibility of the real transformation of our academic environment. The author therefore attempts to distinguish in terms of both theory and method between two types of“historical anthropology”: chronologically the first type has been closer to historical sociology (and directed in its way to the history of mentalities), while the second drew inspiration from social anthropology and led towards micro-history. In the Czech environment the ethnologists are closer to the first and the historians to the second, but often without either group being aware of the fundamental difference between the two types.
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Evangelické kalendáře v "dlouhém" 19. století

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Nešpor Z. R.
Český lid: etnologický časopis (Český lid: Ethnological journal)
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2010
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vol. 97
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issue 2
113-143
EN
The almanacs represented an important source and constituent part of the popular culture in the „long“ nineteenth century. The text focuses on the by now slightly studied almanacs of Czech Protestants and, as a supplement, also contains its register. First Protestant calendars were published after the authorization of Protestant denominations at the end of the eighteenth century, but due to the economic weakness of these minorities soon ceased to exist. The next wave of their publishing was connected with liberalism of the middle of the nineteenth century and the social emancipation of Protestants. But the defeat of the revolution of 1848 again caused their demise. Systematic publishing of Protestant almanacs took place only in the last third of the nineteenth century, when their principal role was the gradual deepening of the confessional consciousness. From the beginning of the twentieth century these almanacs were used in the efforts for uniting of Czech Lutheran and Reformed Churches. This union was realized after the constitution of Czechoslovakia in the year 1918. Later Protestant almanacs were mostly regular ecclesiastical yearbooks without broader implications.
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Religion: An Unsolved Problem for the Modern Czech Nation

63%
Nešporová O., Nešpor Z. R.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2009
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vol. 45
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issue 6
1215–1237
EN
The Czech Republic is widely known as ‘the least religious’ country in the world and most Czechs are quite proud of that fact. The authors, however, challenge both of these characteristics. Czechs might better be considered unchurched than atheist, with various forms of modern New Age spirituality steadily gaining in popularity. Moreover, their reputation for irreligiosity is somewhat questionable, since it is most often based upon communist (and other more historically deep-rooted) anticlerical notions, while people have little real knowledge of the ideas which they so readily reject. These assertions are based both on quantitative data, provided by census returns and ISSP surveys on religion, and on qualitative data, collected in local ethnographic research in the town of Česka Lipa in northern Bohemia, designed along the lines of the Lancaster University Kendal Project in Great Britain. The Czech population can be divided into three ‘blocks’, religionists, spiritualists, and atheists/unbelievers, none of which, however, can be considered uniform in terms of membership or truly mutually exclusive. The authors conclude that traditional religionists of various denominations, the followers of New Age movements, and the ‘rest’ of the population can be seen as three distinctive groups within society and that mutual understanding and acceptance are by no means the norm.
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„V žáru lásky se život započal – v žáru ohně se končí“. Čtyři pohledy na vývoj kremačního hnutí v české společnosti

63%
Nešpor Z. R., Nešporová O.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2011
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issue 4
563-602
EN
In this article the authors analyse mutually related but, at least as regards Czech society, not always directly interdependent aspects of the cremation movement in the twentieth century: the growth in pro-cremation propaganda and its impact, the establishment of new crematoria, the spread of the popularity of cremation as a me thod of disposing of the dead throughout society and changes in the rituals associated with it. The long domination of ideology over social interests with r egard to cremation is evident, for example, in the fact that in the first half of the twentieth century the cremation movement attracted substantially more followers than those who eventually chose this method of disposal for themselves, a method that was later encouraged and eventually accepted throughout Czech society as a result of pressure from the Communist régime. Furthermore, for many years, the construction and decoration of cre- matoria, as well as ceremonies connected with cremation, reflected ideological perspectives rather than practical social needs. The authors explain this in terms of Czech attitudes towards religion, which were influenced by a number of factors, not just the Communist regime. The subsequent de-ideologization of these various aspects was quite slow, not taking place till the late twentieth century, and then only to a limited extent. Contemporary Czech society has one of the highest cremation rates in Europe, a fact connected both with deeprooted Czech anticlericalism and with the path dependence of funeral rituals that became firmly entrenched during the Communist era.
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