Naše nynější krize: Pokus o po třetí pro Jóhanna Pálla Árnasona

Taking Lovejoy’s history of ideas perspective, the study compares two central texts of Czech political philosophy: Our currently Crisis of T.G. Masaryk (1895) and the essay of the same name by Karel Kosík (1968) and shows two forms of thematization of the crisis of modernity in a particular constellation on national life. The paper points out their thematic and argumentative analogies and analyses them against the background of the more general themes of the Czech political culture: spontaneous egalitarianism, distrust of politician, the role of writers, narrow conceptions of party politics, opinion polarisation of public. The paper then examines the texts as historically concretized answers to the changing social structure of the Czech national society. Masaryk’s text was written at the height of (what M. Hroch calls) the “third phase” of the emancipation of the “small nation”. The second text came at the time of the unfinished and unsuccessful stabilization of the social structure of Czechoslovak society after the 1948 communist coup, culminating in attempts at political reform in 1968. The authors are convinced of the “crisis of the modern man”, of the emptiness of the ideas of their world and the loosening of its values, the alienation of the political system and the non-principled pragmatism of problem-solving. A strong common motive is the critique of politics as the dominant and “all-wrenching” sphere of social and cultural life. While T. G. Masaryk saw a solution in updating the supra-individual and trans-national political and spiritual values of communal life, Karel Kosík believed that redress could be based on a return to the “pre-Stalinist” idea of proletariat as a “subject of history”.