The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe

Download or read book The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe written by Raymond C. Taras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.