České spory o liberalismus

The book analyses two czech disputes over liberalism in which two leading czech intellectuals and politicians were participants – T. G. Masaryk and Václav Havel. The disputes occurred in entirely different periods, and so it is open to question whether any continuities whatsoever can be found in the actions and thinking of their protagonists. The book is a kind of conceptual test of the Czech democratic myth, which views these two figures of 'philosophers on the throne' in alignment. The reader first learns how Masaryk reformulated key concepts of Czech political emancipation, and how in doing so he criticized contemporary liberalism and demanded its social and democratic transformation. After the fall of communism, the issue that became the topic of Havel's dispute concerned the limitations of transformative neoliberalism, which had anti-democratic implications. However, it turns out that in these different disputes, the liberal tradition, which had its European coordinates and gave democratic meaning to Czech political emancipation, came to the fore. It is to be hoped that this liberal tradition has its relevance even today, when new dangers to democracy are emerging, especially the wave of anti-liberalism, nationalism and conservatism that is rising all around.