Publication Details

Abstract

I can see two main reasons why in Czechoslovakia in the sixties a comparatively rapid “modernization“ of Marxism could succeed. The historians underestimated the theoretical or conceptional or methodological questions of their scientific branch and for a long time they could not cope with the question of elaborating a new Marxist conception of historical science. A non-Marxist view of our history penetrated in a not rounded-off shape. Structuralism was spread the more easily in this country the more the whole historians’ community was imposed by the preferences of the systemic approach in scientific research. In the works of Karel Kosík, who influenced historians considerably, elements of structuralism are to be found. In his interpretation of the past and of the present “the bearers of power“ in capitalism and “the bearers of power“ in socialism are put on the same level. The notion of “the masses“ coalesces in his interpretation with that of “manipulation“. The historians Graus, Macek, Bartošek, Pichlík, Mlynářík were “fascinated“ by “modernization“ of Marxism, namely by the artificial constructions of the structuralists and by the “fine“ forms of idealism. Structuralism as a philosophical stream was “sympathetic“ to them for its decline from Marxist methodology and from philosophy of history. J. Šedivý in his book published in Epocha Publishing House in 1969 speaks about a “different“ policy of the USSR after the year 1939, when, as he says, the USSR respected “its interest“ only. Thus modern history was deformed.