This book analyzes such symbolic designs of the modern troubled imagination as the conspiracy theory of society, deterministic concepts of identity and order, antisemitic obsessions, self-hatred, and the myth of the loss of roots. It offers, among other things, the unique East-Central European materials incorporated in a broad, imaginative synthesis and critique of contemporary social analysis.

Aleksandras Shtromas (1931-1999), a British-American scholar, became an eminent figure in his native Lithuania, yet Westem social scientists have yet to discover this human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and political thinker. Shtromas had no doubts about the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union, resting his analysis on the assumption that communism was unable to provide any viable social and moral order. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia had become skilled at the ideological cat-and-mouse games, wrestling wth Soviet Newspeak and (...) censorship, and employing an Aesopian language in order to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and lies. A gifted prophet of post-communism, Shtromas was the only political scientist in the world who took the disintegration of the Soviet Union as early as the late 1970s as an ongoing process. This essay links Shtromas' legacy to the great East European dissenters. (shrink)

Lewis Mumford's discursive map, uncovering the trajectories of modem consciousness and Western social philosophy, dates back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the great tradition of American Romanticism However, Mumford's discursive map of the idea of the city cannot be reduced to architecture and city planning alone. His world of ideas draws on such thinkers and concepts as Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Benton MacKaye's Eutopian ideas, Patrick Geddes' regional planning, and Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture (Broadacre City), anticipated (...) by Louis Henri Sullivan. Mumford's theoretical constructions also reflect the worldviews of Simmel, Tönnies, Spengler, and Toynbee, as well as other influential social theories of the last two centuries, Mumford was apparently the first among twentieth-century intellectuals to grasp that human creation, interaction, self-fulfillment, and the search for perfectibility all take place in the city. (shrink)

This volume is an attempt to rethink Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the most challenging political thinkers in the history of European political thought.

Modern Lithuanian philosophy originated as aresponse to the questions formulated in Russianphilosophy – religious, moral, and social.Later it turned to Continental Europeanphilosophy, preoccupying itself with German andFrench existentialism, hermeneutics, andphenomenology. Yet the loss of independentpolitical and intellectual existence Lithuaniaexperienced for five decades isolated andmarginalized the then lively and promisingintellectual culture. In the 1980s, Lithuanianphilosophy started recovering and reorientingitself, again, to Western currents of moderntheoretical thought. Drawing on the example ofmodern Lithuanian philosophy, the articlepresents a detailed historical overview of whatmight be (...) termed the East-Central European routeto political and cultural modernity. (shrink)

The book is comprised of essays that utilize Shakespeare as a productive window into topics of contemporary social and political relevance. Its interdisciplinary qualities make the book relevant for students of political studies, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and history.

Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and György Konrád for allegedly (...) excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To what extent was Kundera right in assuming that, if to exist means to be present in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe does not exist anymore, just as Western Europe as we knew it has stopped existing? What were the mental, cultural, and intellectual realities that lay beneath or behind his beautiful and graceful metaphors? Are we justified in rehabilitating political optimism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Are we able to reconcile the divided memories of Eastern or Central Europe and Western Europe regarding what happened to the world in 1968? And where is Central Europe now? (shrink)

Does it make sense to refer to the social and political existence of the Baltic countries as to being between civilizations of East and West, or as being on the boundary of two worlds? What are the most characteristic features of modern moral imagination? How does it manifest itself in the politics and cultures of the Baltic countries? These will be the main foci of the book series intended and launched as a critical examination of identity, politics, and culture in (...) the Baltic countries. We are not going to confine this series to Soviet and post-Communist studies. By offering a wide scope of the social science and humanities disciplines, we would like to encourage intercultural dialogue and also to pursue interdisciplinary research in the field of Baltic studies. --Book Jacket. (shrink)