Marxism and Catholic Intellectual Milieu in Interwar Czechoslovakia

The paper aims to analyse a discussion on Marxism among Czech interwar Catholic authors. For this purpose, it follows two separate yet interacting discourses. Firstly, it examines a critique of Marxism in Christian sociology. Here, it pays attention to the most important authors of this era – Alois Soldát, František Reyl and Bedřich Vašek. Our reading of their sociological syntheses suggests that their aim was not a mere refutation of Marxism but rather an attempt to seriously engage with multifaceted legacy of Marx’s thought. While they generally appreciated the depth of Marx’s analysis, the Czech Christian sociologists tended to be critical to the common foundations of modern secularized ideologies. In that regard, their critique was not aimed only at Marxism but also on classical liberalism, that was perceived as a natural precursor of Marxism. Second half of the paper is devoted to the commentaries on Marxism published in the Czech Catholic periodical. Here we might find rather less nuanced reading of Marxism with tendency for unequivocal rejection of Marxism, which was predominantly seen as a reductive philosophical system based on a nihilistic presupposition and essentially inimical to the idea of human personal dignity and freedom. The second part of the paper is focused on the work of Jaroslav Durych and Rudolf Ina Malý.