This study on Alois Klar (1763-1833) focuses mainly on his achievements as a pedagogue and his work for the visually impaired. Methodologically, it draws on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Michel Foucault, enabling us to view the evolution of social care as a concomitant of the emerging modern state and integral to its structure. The study presents an analysis of the beginnings of Klar’s Prague institute for the visually impaired against a background of rapid changes in medicine, the scope of the state, and educational thinking. At a time of compulsory school attendance and new approaches to education, when the state demanded the active participation of its subjects/citizens in propagating its aims and the values of society as a whole, the blind and partially sighted were given access to a full and systematic education. We also present data concerning Klar’s educational work and thinking (he taught in Litoměřice and at Prague University), and examine the internal workings of the newly established institute - one of the first of its kind in Europe - and its contacts with the medical discourse of the emerging science of ophthalmology., Marek Fapšo., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
This text considers the early creative output of Ignác Cornova, in particular his lesserknown odes and his war poetry. It draws on contemporary research of the latter third of the 18th century focussing on the dynamic social change of the period, the transformation of the media, the emergence of a modern ‘public’, and changing perceptions of artistic as opposed to educational output. One of the difficulties of conceptualizing this period is the existence of two opposing trends – the older ‘Baroque’ tradition and the more ‘modern’ currents of the future national movement. Our text largely obviates this dichotomy by proposing a framework in which Cornova’s oeuvre is seen as evidence of an idiosyncratic cultural situation with its own features and markers. The aim of our study is to place Cornova’s early works within the literary context of his time – a context hard to appreciate today. We are not looking for the ‘future’ Cornova in those beginnings, nor the ‘embryos’ of his later development. Rather, we hope to rehabilitate the literary context in the Czech lands in the 1770s and 1780s as it veered between late Baroque odes, war reportage, and enlightenment patriotism. Alongside Cornova we consider now forgotten figures such as Vojtěch Koťara, Michael Denis, Johann Joseph Eberle and Václav Thám. The result is not a group biography, but rather a problem analysis of one segment of a period that defies unequivocal definition.
This essay was inspired by the thoughts of Daniela Tinková on the role of the Czech Enlightenment. We begin by acknowledging its importance for a deeper understanding of Czech history, before going on to address four problem areas. The first is the significance of Enlightenment efforts in the field of popular education (Volksaufklärung), which in the Czech context necessarily introduced the need for vernacularization. These efforts thus have an important, hitherto undervalued place among the factors that strengthened the impetus of national agitation (the second phase of the Czech national movement). We also consider the role played in the national movement of a clergy trained under the Josephenist system, and the defining characteristics of that clergy.
The aim of this paper is to point out that the growing need for well‐educated citizens in the increasingly bureaucratized 18th Century, in itself a wellknown phenomenon, should be seen in a wider context. First, we must consider how it relates to the gradual emergence of the modern European nationstate; and secondly, to the cultural and political consequences of social stratification. In nations with a cohesive social structure and, in some cases, a tradition of statehood, the growing numbers and importance of the new intelligentsia were primarily the result of an expansion of existing elites drawing on their own social class. In emerging nations formed largely through nationalist movements, on the other hand, the process was accompanied by the upward mobility of young men from the middle and lower middle classes. In some nations, such as the Czechs and the Finns, these were often the sons of petit bourgeois and artisan families; but in the majority of cases the emergent national intelligentsia found its recruits chiefly among farmers and the rural population as a whole (Lithuania, Estonia). Understandably, this distinction led to differences in the formation of national stereotypes, political cultures and attitudes to social organization. The use of the term "plebeian intelligentsia" in this context is meant as a typological characteristic rather than a pejorative label., Miroslav Hroch., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy