Marxism and existentialism in state socialist Czechoslovakia

0575421 - FLÚ 2024 RIV DE eng J - Journal Article
Růžička, Jiří - Mervart, Jan
Marxism and existentialism in state socialist Czechoslovakia.
Studies in East European Thought. Roč. 75, č. 3 (2023), s. 399-416. ISSN 0925-9392. E-ISSN 1573-0948
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : existentialism * Marxism * Czechoslovakia * being * existence * freedom
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Impact factor: 0.2, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09493-y

Existentialism became one of the most fashionable philosophical currents in postwar Czechoslovakia. Whereas the orthodox Marxism of the 1950s, following Lukacs’s Marxism or existentialism?, hastily condemned existentialism as an offshoot of bourgeois idealism, Marxists of the 1960s viewed existentialism as a philosophical current that deserved, at the least, serious examination. During the subsequent era of Czechoslovak “real” socialism of the 1970s and 1980s, existentialism was, as a result, interpreted as one of the sources of the 1968 “counterrevolution”. This article maps and analyzes the official Marxist reception of existentialism in the course of the Stalinist, post-Stalinist and so-called real socialist periods of Czechoslovak history. However, its main focus is on the post-Stalinist period, when Czechoslovak philosophy benefited from a lively debate between Marxism and existentialism. Some participants in this debate considered existentialism to be an important rival to Marxism, one that posed the very same questions yet offered slightly different answers. At the center of the polemics lay the existentialist categories of being, existence, and freedom.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0345766