Abstract
This is an essay in the short history of social thought on East European transformations1. I shall present the structure of the discourse on the likely economic, social and political dynamics under postcommunism. I shall also point to the historical and theoretical roots of the competing concepts and assess the contribution of transitology to our understanding of social change2. While reviewing various interpretations of Eastern Europe’s transformation I identified two important axes of the debate: the political consequences of capitalist expansion and the impact of the communist legacy on the viability and specificity of East European democratic market societies. I shall use these axes as a simple framework to analyse the nature of the discourse. Specifically, I shall structure the transformation debate according to the participants’ answers to the following questions. (1) Is economic liberalism a prerequisite of, or a threat to political freedom and democracy? (2) Is the communist legacy a liability, or an asset from the viewpoint of the emerging market society? In section 2, I shall introduce four frequently advocated but mutually contradicting theses on the perspectives and the sources of viability of the post-communist market society. Studying the origins of rival views I argue that they are not entirely new, rather in essence each of them had been advocated earlier in different historical contexts. Based on Albert O. Hirschman’s tableau of theories3 in section 3, I shall demonstrate that the manner social scientists think about postcommunism has much in common with the ideas of their predecessors who faced the emergence of capitalism over the past centuries.
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Greskovits, B. (2000). Rival Views of Postcommunist Market Society. In: Dobry, M. (eds) Democratic and Capitalist Transitions in Eastern Europe. The GeoJournal Library, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4162-8_2
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