Anti-modernism

Radical Revisions of Collective Identity

Diana Mishkova, Marius Turda, Balázs Trencsényi, Diana Mishkova, Marius Turda, Balázs Trencsényi

• Publisher: Central European University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9789637326622
• eBook ISBN:
  9789633860953
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authorsalsoformulatedalternativevisions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies thatfocused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism—in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in anantimodernist key.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter I. Integral Nationalism
• Chapter II. The Crisis of the European Conscience
• Chapter III. In Search of a National Ontology
• Chapter IV. Conservative Redefinitions of Tradition and Modernity
• Chapter V. The Anti-modernist Revolution
• Basic Secondary Literature on Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe
• Glossary of Key Terms Used for the Construction of Collective Identity
• Back cover