Rethinking the East European revolutions

pp. 18-39

in: Feiwel Kupferberg, The break-up of communism in East Germany and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

The revolutions in Eastern Europe are quickly turning into history. We are now living in a post-communist world and, for many of us, any attempt to linger on the deeper meanings and intellectual consequences of these revolutions is becoming hopelessly anachronistic. What Kundera wrote some years ago about our societies, that they live in the present and permanently erase the past, is certainly true also of the social sciences.