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This valuable collection of essays makes a scholarly contribution to our knowledge of Central and Eastern European history. With ground-breaking contributions from international scholars such as Philip Longworth and Piotr Gorecki, this volume is an essential text for anyone studying or generally interested in understanding the development of the post-Communist world.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 effectively ended the division of Europe into East and West, and the features of our world that have resulted bear little resemblance to those of the forty years that preceded the Wall's fall. The rise of a new Europe prompts many questions, most of which remain to be answered. What does it all mean? Where is it going to lead? Are we witnessing the conclusion of an era without seeing anything to replace an old and admittedly dismal way of life? What will a market economy do to the social texture of various countries of Central Europe? Will it not make some rich while many will become poorer than ever? How can the rule of law be brought about?In this incisive and lucid book, Ralf Dahrendorf, one of Europe's most distinguished scholars, ponders these and other equally vexing questions. He regards what has happened in East Central Europe as a victory for neither of the social systems that once opposed each other across the Iron Curtain. Rather, he views these events as a vote for an open society over a closed society. The continuing conundrum, he argues, which will plague peoples everywhere, will be how to balance the need for economic growth with the desire for social justice while building authentic and enduring democratic institutions.Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which includes a new introduction from the author, is a humane, skeptical, and anti-utopian work, a manifesto for a radical liberalism in which the social entitlements of citizenship are as important a condition of progress as the opportunities for choice. A fascinating study of change and geopolitics in the modern world, Reflections points the way towards a new politics for the twenty-first century. Ralf Dahrendorf, born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929, is a member of Britain's House of Lords. He was professor of sociology at Hamburg, Tobingen and Konstanz from 1957 to 1968, and in 1974 moved to Britain. He has been the director
This book is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood both as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy?as well as the older political traditions?and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
The transformation of Central and Eastern Europe from communist rule has opened the countries concerned to renewed assessment of their historical identity. These essays record and contribute to that reassessment, reminding us of the diversity of experience, largely ignored after the Second World War.
Since the 1970s West German historiography has been one of the main arenas of international comparative history. It has produced important empirical studies particularly in social history as well as methodological and theoretical reflections on comparative history. During the last twenty years however, this approach has felt pressure from two sources: cultural historical approaches, which stress microhistory and the construction of cultural transfer on the one hand, global history and transnational approaches with emphasis on connected history on the other. This volume introduces the reader to some of the major methodological debates and to recent empirical research of German historians, who do comparative and transnational work.
This is a volume of scholarly essays that considers the meaning of Europe by examining aspects of Central European history as well as issues dealing with the EU's enlargement into Central Europe. These factors contribute to ideas of a definition of Europe that reflects the values and aspirations of all its citizens.
This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.
For better or worse, E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.
History as a field of learning is in a state of crisis. It has lost much of its influence in institutions of higher learning and its place in public esteem. Historians have, in large part, lost touch with the intelligent lay reader and with the undergraduate college student. History's value to society is being questioned. In this work, a distinguished historian views the profession to which he has been devoted for more than thirty years. Theodore S. Hamerow's learned observations will be welcomed by all historians and by those involved in the management of higher education, and should be required reading for all graduate students in history. Far from being a sentimental look at the past, Hamerow's work confronts the unpleasant reality of the present. History, he says flatly, is a discipline in retreat. The profession is in serious trouble and there are no signs that its problems will be resolved in the foreseeable future. After identifying the current crisis, Hamerow proceeds to trace the development of the profession over the last hundred years and to examine its characteristics in modern society. In this section of the book he shares some fascinating practical observations on the ways in which the profession operates. Hamerow explains why some historians rise to prominence while others do not. He also examines causes of the dissatisfactions that afflict many historians and their students. Hamerow also examines the way in which academic historians live their lives, as he expands on the daily realities that they face. He then explains how those realities have shaped scholarship and led to the "new history." The broad use of social science methods, he observes, has had the effect of isolating the new historians from traditional historians, indeed from one another. Couched in the arcane prose of machine-readable languages, says Hamerow, history has become inaccessible to the intelligent lay reader who had once read historical works with interest, understanding, and appreciation. In concluding his examination, Hamerow asks, "What is the use of history?" It has long been a favorite question asked by historians, but seldom one over which they agonized for very long. After considering various arguments for the usefulness of historical investigation, Hamerow offers his own justification. There are times, says Hamerow, when even the most spontaneous or instructive cultural pursuits need to be examined in the light of the purposes they serve and the goals they seek. Now might be a good time for all historians to take a long look at the direction their discipline has taken in the past century, at the functions it has come to perform, and at the serious dilemma it now faces. Hamerow is a steady and helpful guide to any such examination.