In East-Central Europe, Marxist humanism embodied one of the most promising theoretical developments of the 1960s. While respecting the unquestionable value of this intellectual current, this article highlights the contradiction between the emancipatory proclamations of humanist intellectuals and their reluctance to recognize certain prevalent forms of oppression. After comparing the humanist approach toward gender-structured themes in the former Czechoslovakia with the contrasting techno-optimist approach, the latter group is shown to have been more sensitive toward women’s issues. Th e article concludes that there was an intrinsic problem in Marxist humanist theory that contributed to this historical shortcoming in its emancipatory eff orts.
My study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of two theorists in what were probably the most formative years of postwar Austrian history, the era of the conservative government of Josef Klaus. Specifi cally, I compare the conservative philosophy of right of Austrian philosopher of Croatian origin René Marcic and the Marxist humanism of Ernst Fischer. In doing so, it is my intention to describe the ideological foundations and intellectual horizons of Josef Klaus’s right-wing government and, at the same time, to discuss how this policy was confronted by Ernst Fischer from the left. A further purpose of my study is to inquire into the intellectual foundations that laid the ground for Austrian civil society, and to ask how these foundations were confronted by the Austrian Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Ernst Fischer.
Th is paper looks at the women in and around the Yugoslav philosophical journal Praxis (1964–1974), some of whom would later become leading feminist activists in Yugoslavia during the late 1970s and 1980s. Th ese women, while being students of philosophy, mediated knowledge from abroad by reviewing and commenting on new publications from the West. Since translations of these books were not yet available in Yugoslavia, the role these women played as reviewers can be highlighted as important to how Praxis and the journal’s associated summer school became international platforms for the exchange of ideas between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. In presenting the role of women in the journal Praxis, this paper engages with an issue concerning the presence of female intellectual authors as producers of knowledge. Th us, it points out further possible areas of research in gender history and the history of the Left.