Chvála kořenů
In Praise of Roots

Summary/Abstract: Kopeček, Michal. Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě. Prague: Argo, 2009, 386 pp. In a detailed review-essay of Michal Kopeček’s recent book (whose title translates as ‘In Search of the Lost Meaning of the Revolution: The Birth and Beginnings of Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe’), the reviewer assesses the theoretical roots of Kopeček’s interpretations, the subtlety of his analysis of terminology, and his broad range of sources. He notes that ‘revisionism’ already had a long history in the 1950s, and points out that in addition to the author’s analyses of revisionist tendencies in philosophy and sociology one could trace it in their application to economics, jurisprudence, and belles-lettres. The part of the book that makes the greatest contribution to our understanding is, according to the reviewer, the discussion of the development of revisionism in Poland, where the ground was best prepared for revisionism and where, in the intellectual activity of Leszek Kołakowski, it reached its apex in central Europe. Of similar importance was Georg (György) Lukács, in Hungary, but he sought mainly to justify Leninism in theoretical terms. In Czechoslovakia, unlike in these two neighbouring countries, revisionism lacked political support and had to wait till the second half of the 1960s to become fully developed. But that part of the story is beyond the scope of the publication under review.

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