Abstract

The volume offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages wedged between Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision of transnational intellectual history. The authors focus on the ways political thinkers outside of Western Europe sought to bridge the gap between an idealized Western modernity and their own societies. Mapping these discourses and debates from the Enlightenment to the First World War, the volume helps rethinking some of our basic assumptions about the history of modern European culture and politics.