Abstract
Yugoslavia was the site of unorthodox thinking on multiple fronts during the postwar period. In addition to the geopolitical innovation of the “non-aligned movement” and its domestic attempt at “self-management socialism,” the intellectual environment in the country after Tito’s 1948 break with Stalin also allowed for the development of theoretical work that departed from the Marxism-Leninism of the rest of the communist bloc. One of the most important attempts to blend Marxism with decidedly non-Leninist elements comes from the Slovenian politician and intellectual, France Bučar. In the postwar period, Bučar sought to link his political activity to his intellectual work by developing his own critical systems theory. Unlike the thinkers within the Soviet Union, he was able to explore theoretical resources beyond Karl Marx, focusing in particular the groundbreaking work of Max Weber. This resulted in an agent-centric approach to systems theory that highlights the importance of the individual and geopolitical ethics. This paper aims to situate Bučar’s work in the context of postwar Yugoslavia. In so doing, I bring Bučar into conversation with the most important movement that sought to bring Marx together with Weber from the Western side of the Iron Curtain, i.e. the Frankfurt School of critical theory. I argue that certain aspects of Bučar’s critical systems theory bear a striking resemblance to Habermas’s own attempts to integrate Weberian insights into his own version of critical theory. I conclude by reflecting on how Bučar’s work can be understood as a combination of Eastern praxis with Western critique.
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Notes
- 1.
Although I will focus on these two variants, many other interpretations of critical systems theory exist. For an overview, see Bausch (2001).
- 2.
The journal actually had both a domestic and an international edition. The foreign contributors include Jürgen Habermas, Lucien Goldman, Herbert Marcuse, André Gorz, Norman Birnbaum and Donald Hodges, among others.
- 3.
These meetings continue to this day. However, as a result of the Yugoslavian civil war, since 1992 they have been held in Prague under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in cooperation with Charles University. I am proud to be a regular participant at these meetings, which continue the tradition of the Praxis summer school, even though my name has been misspelled (Verošek instead of Verovšek) in the official list of participants published for the 25th anniversary of the relocation of the conference to Prague. See The Prague Conference: Directors, General Themes, Plenaries, Workshops (2017).
- 4.
Bučar’s name is not included in a partial list of participants, but he may still have been present.
- 5.
This shared desire is also the root for another similarities between Bučar and the Frankfurt School: their mutual interest in American pragmatism. See Rehg and Bohman (2001).
- 6.
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Verovšek, P.J. (2019). Eastern Praxis and Western Critique: France Bučar’s Critical Systems Theory in Context. In: Kovač, I. (eds) At His Crossroad. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78331-4_1
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