Anotace
The course offers interpretations of crucial transformations of European societies in the twentieth century, promoting understanding of the order of dictatorship and democracy, the bases of social consent, and the roots of popular discontent. Thus, the course focuses predominantly on social preconditions of the destabilization and stabilization of important political and economic hierarchies in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, and provides conceptual tools to analyze and explain major shifts and transformations.
In addition to providing general concepts and analytical tools, the course introduces various case studies—stabilization or collapse of socialist dictatorships, old and new social movements, among others—and tries to depict the significance of everyday-life expectations for explaining the major social and political transformations of modern European societies.