Čeští komunističtí intelektuálové a "národní cesta k socialismu" : Zdeněk Nejedlý a Karel Kosík, 1945-1968

• Authors: Michal Kopeček

Title variants

EN

Czech Communist intellectuals and the ''national road to Socialism'' : Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík, 1945-68

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

CS

a2_Karel Kosík se nejprve pokusil z radikálně levicových pozic o vypracování alternativní, implicitně polemické koncepce národní revoluční kontinuity, která hledala inspiraci u českých radikálních demokratů a v jejich revolučním vystoupení z roku 1848, aby se od konce padesátých let stal jedním z představitelů marxistického revizionismu v Československu, filozofickým kritikem stalinismu a dehumanizace moderního člověka pod tlakem abstraktních ideologií a mocensko-byrokratických aparátů a nakonec si získal pověst filozofa pražského jara 1968. Autor neusiluje o vyčerpávající portrét obou těchto osobností, nýbrž o charakteristiku základních kontur jejich řešení dilematu mezi národně partikulárním a revolučně univerzálním, jemuž čelili a s nímž se museli tak či onak vyrovnávat všichni komunističtí a radikálněsocialističtí myslitelé jejich doby. Myšlenkový a tvůrčí vývoj obou osobností je přitom zasazen do širších politických souvislostí doby od konce druhé světové války do pražského jara 1968.

EN

a1_In this article the author starts from the notion of ''national road to Socialism'' in its two fundamental meanings - the political-tactical and the theoretical. He seeks to demonstrate, usig the Czech example, the complicated dynamic development of the central themes of the ''ideological whirlwinds'' of the twentieth century which are concentrated in the terms ''revolution'' and ''national emancipation''. To this end he focuses on two important Czech Communist political thinkers and activists - the historian, musicologist, and minister in post-war Czechoslovak governments, Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878-1962), and the philosopher and essayist KIarel Kosík (1926-2003) - each of whom, with regard to their generation and their lives in general, represents a different Czech radical left-wing intellectual approach to the challenges of his times. Each man, in his own distinctive way, sought to formulate the prerequisites and conceptual framework of the Czechoslovak, or Czech "national road" to Socialism, but also to warn about pirfalls. With his early post-Second World War conception of Czechoslovak Communists as the heirs of progressive national traditions, Nejedlý sought to show how the legacy of the Hussite revolution of the fifteenth century and the National Awakening of the nineteenth century was currently relevant to Communist policy. Indeed, on the whole he succeeded in linking it with Communist Party efforts to achieve the historical legitimation of their government and thus create the official framework of the interpretation of Czech history which remained authoritatively valid throughout the 1950s.

EN

a2_Kosík, by contrast, first attempted, from radically left-wing positions, to work out alternative, implicitly polemical conceptions of national revolutionary continuity, which sought inspiration amongst Czech radical democrats and their revolutionary expression in 1848, and he thus became, from the late 1950s, one of the chief representatives of Marxist revisionism in Czechoslovakia, a philosopher-critic of Stalinism and the dehumanization of modern man and woman under the pressure of abstract ideologies and the apparatus of power and the bureaucracy, eventually earning the reputation of the philosopher of the Prague Spring of 1968. The author does not seek to portray these two figures exhaustively, instead, his aim is to provide the basic contours of how each tried to solve the dilemma between tne nationally particular and the revolutionarily universal, which all Communist and radical Socialist thinkers of their time faced and somehow had to come to terms with. The author sets the intellectual and creative development of these two figures into the wider political context from the end of the Second World War to the Prague Spring.

Keywords

CS

historiografie; filozofie a politika; socialismus

EN

historiography; philosophy and politics; socialism

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 77-117
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Michal Kopeček

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