From Scientific Social Management to Neoliberal Governmentality? Czechoslovak Sociology and Social Research on the Way from Authoritarianism to Liberal Democracy, 1969-1989
2017
Abstract
The paper focuses on official Marxist sociology and social science research in Czechoslovakia as one of the central "discipline of governance" in the 1970s and 1980s. With most of the first-class practitioners being purged after 1968, the study pays little attention to the intrinsic value of sociological production in the given period focusing instead on the modus operandi of the "apologetic sociology:" the ways in which sociological knowledge was used to help manage the "socialist society" in late communist regime, and how that knowledge was adapted to the changes brought about by perestroika whilst anticipating its own transformation during the early liberal democratic period after 1989.