Rehabilitate Marx: The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Post-Stalinist Modernity

Rehabilitate Marx! conceptualizes new forms of socialist modernity during the post-Stalinist era in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s. After the demise of Stalinism, Czechoslovak intellectuals within the Communist Party realized that the primary challenge they faced wasn’t merely the further development of socialism, which would lead to communism, but that they needed to reformulate the entire socialist project. These intellectuals gradually abandoned the Marxist orthodoxy of their time and began searching for new interpretations of classic Marxist works that would provide an adequate conceptual framework for addressing contemporary problems. Mervart and Růzička present post-Stalinist thought as an autonomous sphere, showing a world of varying socialist visions.

Jan Mervart (Author)
Jan Mervart is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several books and is a coeditor of Czechoslovakism (Routledge, 2021) and Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Brill, 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.

Jiří Růzička (Author)
Jiří Růzička is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is editor and co-translator of the Czech translation of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Filosofia, 2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.