Issue editors: Matthias Duller and Mikołaj Pawlak
This issue of State of Affairs addresses the experience of sociologists living in Central and Eastern Europe under state socialism. The first paper presents the variety of strategies adopted by sociologists working in communist states. The following four papers recount the political history of the social sciences in Romania, Poland, Belarus, and Albania, giving a sense of the similarities and differences of sociology’s fate in different countries. Other papers deal, respectively, with independent research projects on lifestyles in Poland and Hungary; the evolution of Marxism into an empirical sociology of social structures in Poland; and the apologetic sociology that helped to build socialist society in the last two decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The last paper contains an analysis of the history of the concept of civil society in Sweden.
In book reviews authors discuss the unity of the experience of totalitarianism under communist regimes; official and opposition memory in late socialist Poland; the 1989 revolutions in Central Europe; the idea of Central Europe in Czech and Polish intellectual milieu; Stanisław Ossowski, a key figure in Polish sociology after the Second World War; and the status of political science in Poland in relation to its position in the international academic field. The last essay is a review of a volume of papers on phenomenological sociology, which were published in memory of Richard Grathoff.