A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ and Beyond, Part I: 1918-1968

The volume offers the first ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages wedged between Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision of transnational intellectual history. The authors focus on the ways political thinkers outside or on the margins of Western Europe sought to bridge the gap between an idealized Western modernity and their own societies. Mapping these discourses and debates from the First World War to the 2010s, the volume helps rethinking some of our basic assumptions about the history of modern European culture and politics and also offers a contribution to the current debates on the resilience of liberal democracy.