Preparing Liberty in Central Europe

The often turbulent history of the Czechs and Slovaks in the 20th Century, leading from the Czechoslovak Republic to four decades of communist rule, ended with the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The independent Czech and Slovak democracies achieved EU membership in 2004. While their political histories under Austrian and Hungarian rule in 19th Century has been widely researched, their intellectual history is still largely unknown, mainly due to a lack of English translations. Preparing Liberty in Central Europe provides a collection of newly translated texts by Czech and Slovak intellectuals and political thinkers, covering the period of time from the Spring of Nations in 1848 to the Spring of Prague in 1968. The collection includes Ján Kollárs On literary reciprocity, T.G. Masaryks The difficulties of Democracy and the debate about the Czech Fate between Václav Havel and Milan Kundera in 1968/9. The volume addresses students of history, philosophy, political science and Slavic Studies, interested in issues such as Slavonic national revival, Panslavism, Austroslavism, liberalism and Human Rights. Additional comments on text and author guide the reader through one hundred and thirty years of Czech and Slovak political thought. A large selected bibliography and index complement the volume.

Autorentext

The author: Josette Baer, P.D. (Zurich 2006), Ph.D. (Zurich 1996), is lecturer of political thought with a particular focus on Slavonic political thought at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. From 2001-2004, she was a stipendiate of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Baer's publications include papers in Democratisation, East Central Europe-L'Europe du Centre-Est-Mitteleuropa, Studies in East European Thought and Balkanistica. Her latest research Slavic Thinkers or the Creation of Polities will be forthcoming in winter 2006/7. The foreword author: Zden k V. David, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., Slavic bibliographer and lecturer at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, librarian of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Educated as a historian (Ph.D. Harvard, 1960), he is co-author of The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918 with the late Robert A. Kann. David's contributions were published in Bohemia, Austrian History yearbook, Historický asopis, European Jewish Affairs, Folia Historica Bohemica, Slavic Review and Slavonic and East European Review. His latest publication is Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists' Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther.