Rehabilitate Marx!

The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Post-Stalinist Modernity

[Rehabilitate Marx!] looks at a cohort of ferocious young Stalinists when the Communist Party seized power in 1948 and were rewarded with places in the official intelligentsia. After Stalin died in 1953 these philosophers were not ready to give up on Marxism. The book in effect tells the tale of a group failure that may haunt our own time more than we realize... probably the most interesting text produced by this generation of philosophers was the output of a group of techno-optimists, who heralded the dawn of the scientific-technological revolution that would bring liberation through automation and cybernetics. [Their report] taunts us from across the decades with promises of a life of productive, meaningful leisure in which technological advances free us from drudgery. The idealized workplace resembles today’s hyperscale data centers operated by a spectral skeleton crew while consuming huge quantities of water and electricity. Perhaps [these] unquiet dreams haunt the executive suites of Silicon Valley, whose oligarchs are themselves fond of manifestos promising revolutionary change, and are always eager to curry political favor.

Times Literary Supplement

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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 faced wasn’t merely the further development of socialism, which would lead to communism, but that they needed 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.

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This important study of post-Stalinist thought between the mid-1950s and 1968 in Czechoslovakia considers it as a coherent intellectual space overcoming the limitations of orthodox Marxism. Through its recovery of reflexivity and mediation, Rehabilitate Marx! articulates a concept of universal humanity that ultimately failed by narrowing it into the nation and modernity. A valuable contribution to the legacy of Marxism through a detailed and analytical history of one of its most important periods.

Ian H. Angus, professor emeritus, Simon Fraser University

In the years following the death of Stalin, intellectuals in Eastern Europe—nowhere more so than in Czechoslovakia—sought to refresh Marxist thought and establish a new socialist vision. Mervart and Růžička’s absorbing book examines three interwoven schools of thought—Marxist humanism, techno-optimism, and dialectical determinism—and explores the insights and achievements, and the frustrations and failings, of this ill-fated project of renewal. Compelling reading.

David Bakhurst, Queen’s University

Rehabilitate Marx! is an exceptional journey into intellectual history and a leading contribution to understanding post-Stalinist socialism in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. Jan Mervart and Jiří Růžička offer a deeply historical account, recovering a plurality of unique tendencies that make up the post-Stalinist period in Czechoslovakia, while highlighting their broader relevance for the socialist 1960s and ’70s. A must-read for anyone interested in historical socialism and its intellectual histories in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Zhivka Valiavicharska, Pratt Institute

A significant contribution to the study of the intellectual history of state socialism in Central Europe...it is an outstanding work that deepens our understanding of (not only) Czechoslovak state socialism.

Historický časopis

Table of Contents

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408 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

November, 2025

isbn : 9780822967743

Series

Russian and East European Studies

Subjects

History / Europe / Eastern

about the authors

Jan Mervart is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several books and is coeditor of Czechoslovakism (Routledge, 2021) and Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Brill, 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.

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Jiří Růžička is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is editor and cotranslator of the Czech translation of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Filosofia, 2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.

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