Power and politics: all publications

Review of: SCOTT, J. C. (1998): Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven & London: Yale University Press

 This paper turns attention to the period of state socialism. Its aim is to suggest and illustrate a theoretical and analytical framework for making the communists" power problematic from sociological point of view. We would like to promote such a perspective in which the power of communists is not taken - explicitly or implicitly - as something that explains the logic of life under the communist regime; rather, on the contrary, we present it as something that needs to be explained. As such, our approach is inspired by contemporary sociology of science, above all by authors such as Bruno Latour and John Law whose effort is in many respects similar to ours. After a theoretical outline of the approach, we perform its modest practical illustration. We use short extracts from two biographical narratives for an analysis of one particular situation in which the communist power played an important role: the political screenings that followed the military invasion into Czechoslovakia at the end of so called Prague Spring. The screenings are interpreted, in this analytical sketch, as "trials of strength" as well as "real transformations" both of the communist regime itself and all its actors. Above all, we focus on the moments when somebody or something was transformed into a fulcrum, an indisputable and stable entity, or, on the other hand, into a questionable, not-quite-real, because negotiable and reversible network of relations. These moments help us to show the heterogeneous and often surprisingly subtle sources of the political power that constituted state socialism and made it durable.

Review of: MUSIL, L. (1999): Těžba uhlí, problém prostředí, modernita: jak ovlivnila ekologická výzva organizaci jedné ostravské šachty. Brno: Masarykova univerzita & Georgetown University

This unpublished newspaper article comments on a political pact or treaty that was signed by Social Democracts and the major right-wing opposition political party in 1998 in the Czech Republic. The treaty was to "stabilize" the political scene in the country (Social Democrats lead a minority government); but many critics suspected that, instead, it was a hidden coaliltion, enabling the two seemingly opposing parties to take full and unchallegable control over the country. The Opposition Treaty became the document that spoiled the political culture in the country and that was "behind" practically all negative phenomena. I try to interpret the Treaty from the point of view of actor-network theory, criticizing the causal explanations that took the Treaty as the origin of a political tragedy.

This paper proposes a sociology of state socialism. It does so by discussing the place of state socialism within the debates on modernity and postmodernity and reassessing the possibilities of so-called biographical research in the field of post-communist studies. The paper also outlines a theoretical and analytical framework for making the communists[a] power problematic from a sociological point of view. Such a perspective suggests that the power of the communists is not taken - explicitly or implicitly - as something that naturally explains the logic of life under the communist regime; on the contrary, it is presented as something that needs to be explained. As such, this approach is inspired by contemporary sociology of science, particularly by the work of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the paper hopes to achieve one important side-effect, namely to (re)establish the phenomena of state socialism as a topic worthy of general sociological attention.