A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.

My research re-introduces two social and political thinkers, Erich Fromm and Shōzō Fujita. It would seem that there is no need to go into any detail about the former. He has been generally regarded as a German-American social psychologist who integrated Marx’s historical materialism with Freud’s instinct theory by way of Weberian sociology. The latter is most commonly regarded as a Japanese political thinker who focused on the study of the Tennō system as a Japanese system of government. As we (...) shall see later, it appears that Fromm and Fujita share no link, in the sense of different disciplines and historical backgrounds. Despite these clear differences, however, their academic works have much in common in some respects. First, they both concern themselves with psychoanalytic theory with a focus on the concept of ‘narcissism’ in the social range. Second, they are both in favour of some important theoretical tools and components of philosophy, such as ‘dialectic’ and ‘immanent critique’. Third, they warn against the contemporary tendency and attitude to be indifferent to others and things that do not concern oneself and to exploit others to one’s own advantage in terms of one’s unconscious narcissistic state of mind. Perhaps the first and third common viewpoints are profoundly associated with their contemporaneousness, as both lived chiefly in the twentieth century. In other words, their standpoints are concerned with contemporary phenomena widely seen in many industrialised societies, and it is therefore quite natural that both theorists should lay stress on these two perspectives, particularly taking account of their academic foundations. Apart from these two examples of common grounds, it should be noted that the second common point of view is also related to their similar academic backgrounds. Roughly speaking, both Fromm and Fujita absorbed their intellectual knowledge primarily from Hegel, Marx and Freud. From this perspective, it is not surprising that they have similar theoretical ingredients. In this respect, it is even possible to believe that they are exact heirs of traditional Critical Theory in favour of the task of achieving Mündigkeit, even though many scholars are opposed to this view of their works despite Fromm’s early contributions to the Institute for Social Research and Fujita’s theoretical components capturing the essence of critique. Having said that, my research shines a light not only on their positive theoretical conventions but also on the common negative ingredients in their theories of narcissism. Both their standpoints regard narcissism as a major hindrance to social life. For this reason, we have considerable difficulty in dealing with the problem and therefore in curing the disease by applying their social and political theories due to the fact that narcissism is one of the most fundamental human needs. For the purpose of surmounting this theoretical aporia, I introduce Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic theory, which is in favour of and accepts the desire and existence of narcissism concerning human nature. On the basis of his stance on narcissism, as we shall see below, my research examines how we perceive and experience our democratic life. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the problem of communist power in so called totalitarian regimes. Inspired by strategies of explanation in contemporary science studies and by the ethnomethodological conception of social order, we suggest that the power of communists is not to be taken as an unproblematic source of explanation; rather, we take this power as something that is itself in need of being explained. We study personal narratives on political screenings that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and analyze (...) how the power of communists obtained its strength from ordinary and “unremarkable” interactions between participants. The screenings are interpreted, in the terms of Bruno Latour, as “trials of strength.” We show that it was crucial for all the participants that associations, translations or mobilizations involved in making the regime real, remained partial and multiple, and not exclusive and “total” as is often assumed within dominant discourses on totalitarianism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a democracy what people think matters. Political philosophers are mostly democrats. They often justify deliberative and participatory democracy. And yet when it comes to philosophizing they often turn a blind eye to what people think; they sometimes even express profound doubts about what people think and about consulting the public. I call this the political philosophy gap. It has been justified in several ways. In this paper I first consider and dismiss the most common justifications. I then suggest (...) a democratic and an epistemological reason why political philosophers should consider what people think when they formulate their theories. I put forward a proposal for a method of doing so, which I call public reflective equilibrium, and which consists of four stages of research and philosophy. Finally, I suggest that not only is it doable, but it has a potential to contribute a lot to contemporary political philosophy. It should not come instead of traditional ways of conducting political philosophy but as an additional, perhaps more political, method of political philosophy. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the problem of communist power in so called totalitarian regimes. Inspired by strategies of explanation in contemporary science studies and by the ethnomethodological conception of social order, we suggest that the power of communists is not to be taken as an unproblematic source of explanation; rather, we take this power as something that is itself in need of being explained. We study personal narratives on political screenings that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and analyze (...) how the power of communists obtained its strength from ordinary and “unremarkable” interactions between participants. The screenings are interpreted, in the terms of Bruno Latour, as “trials of strength.” We show that it was crucial for all the participants that associations, translations or mobilizations involved in making the regime real, remained partial and multiple, and not exclusive and “total” as is often assumed within dominant discourses on totalitarianism. (shrink)

The self-limiting revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe offer an alternative paradigm of revolutionary change that is reminiscent more of the American struggle for independence in 1776 than the Jacobin tendencies that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789. In order to understand the contradictory impulses of the revolutions of 1989—the desire for a radical renewal and the concern for preservation—this article takes as its point of departure the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Edmund Burke.

What gives representation its democratic essence? The recent democratic theory literature, particularly spearheaded by Nadia Urbinati, defends representative mediation as a facilitator of ongoing democratic contestation and revision. While I agree with this agonistic defence, I take issue with how Urbinati construes it. For her, representative contestation works in the teleological sense of testing opinions over time and sublimating them into ideological forms as a safeguard against the threat of immediacy. This article locates the traces of such presentism within Urbinati’s (...) own teleological framework, which I see as compromising her commitment to the agonistic vein in representative politics. When our relationship to the future is imagined from such a teleological angle, I argue, the scope of our representative options becomes significantly narrowed down and the possibility of beginning anew looks quite slim. I develop this critique by tapping into Jacques Derrida’s affirmation of untimeliness. (shrink)