Philosophy of the Socialist Crisis in Yugoslavia (1945–1990)
7th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2026, 16:30
Language: English
Speaker: Marija MARTINOVIĆ (CEFRES / Sorbonne Uinversity)
Discussant: Milan SOVILJ (Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Abstract
This thesis examines Yugoslav socialism from 1945 to 1991 as a philosophical process shaped by the tension between unification and disunion. Rather than interpreting the Yugoslav crisis only as a political or economic failure, it approaches it as the progressive exhaustion of a lived ideology: one that aimed to transform social reality while being continuously transformed by it. Socialism is analyzed as an ensemble of concepts, practices, and collective imaginaries in which philosophy was inseparable from everyday political life.
The postwar period is understood as a moment of radical invention, marked by the emergence of a new collective subject forged through revolutionary struggle, reconstruction, and the break with Soviet orthodoxy. Workers’ self-management occupies a central place as an embodied socialist praxis, simultaneously expressing emancipatory aspirations and generating new forms of discipline, coordination, and control. From the 1960s onward, critical Marxist thought reveals growing tensions between philosophical autonomy and institutional oversight. Intellectual debates around freedom, morality, and critique expose the limits of ideological pluralism within the Yugoslav system. The constitutional reforms of 1974 appear as a paradoxical effort to re-legitimate socialism while crystallizing its internal contradictions.
The final years are approached through the intertwined dynamics of crisis, nationality, and memory, as the disintegration of the collective project redirected philosophical reflection, artistic production, and cultural memory toward negotiating both loss and continuity. Yugoslav socialism thus endures as an unresolved legacy whose paradoxes continue to shape post-Yugoslav thought and identity.
Please find the complete program of 2025–2026 seminar here.