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 were facing wasn’t merely the further development of socialism, which would lead to communism: they would need 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 Růžička present post-Stalinist thought as an autonomous sphere, showing a world of varying socialist visions.
