When, at the end of the 1950s, the Communist Party took the first steps towards reviving sociology as a scientific field, which only ten years earlier it had banned and branded a bourgeois pseudoscience, the conditions in Brno were and were not favourable for such a development. On the one hand, Brno was home to the very reputable sociology department of A. I. Bláha, a student of Durkheim's, which had a tradition dating back to the founding of Masaryk University in Brno in 1921. On the other hand, Brno lacked any figures that the Communist Party would at least deem passable and who would be willing to partake in the renewal of a department that in recent history had already been twice disbanded. One fortunate exception was the journalist Josef Solar, a prewar party member, jailed under the Protectorate for resistance involvement. He gradually drew Bláha's former assistants to the department and began building an academically solid institution with a strong emphasis on empirical sociology. This progress was interrupted by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops. The department was again shut down, but some continuity was preserved in the Sociological Research Laboratory, which avoided liquidation and where some politically persecuted teachers found refuge. In 1980 the department of sociology in Brno was reestablished and in 1981 it obtained a competent new head, Jaroslav Stritecký. It also became possible to engage young teaching assistants whose qualification was professional, not political. The development of sociology in Brno in 1980's was further assisted by the biannual conference 'Socialist way of life as social reality', which created an environment supportive of critical study of society.
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This article focuses primarily on the period 1948-1968 in Czechoslovakia in order to provide an understanding of the efforts to revive Czech sociology in the 1960s. The author documents how, after a brief post-war revival, Czech sociology was suppressed and abolished at universities and other institutions after the 1948 communist coup. When policy-makers and planners then realised the need for a type of social information not provided by official statistics, a social survey, representing a kind of rudimentary form of empirical sociology, albeit one serving the regime, was created and carried out by state institutions. In 1956 a revisionist version of Marxist sociology emerged, and the change in the political and intellectual climate in the late 1950s enabled the renewal of some empirically oriented branches of sociology. While in the full sense sociology never officially existed as a theoretical, critical and free academic discipline throughout the period of the communist regime, in the sense that 'sociology' is understood as the application of sociological approaches and methods to specific social issues sociological research did exist in a limited form in Czechoslovakia from the end of the 1950s, and in the 1960s began addressing key social issues. At the end of the Prague Spring any hope of renewing sociology ended with it.
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After the communist coup in 1948 rural sociology in Czechoslovakia was regarded by the new totalitarian regime as an element of bourgeois ideology which had to be destroyed. Empirical research in agriculture and the countryside was deemed unnecessary and incapable of providing any new and useful knowledge. But despite being rejected by party ideologists, the Czech rural sociology survived and in 1960s partook of the general revival of Czech sociology and other social sciences. The most important contributions to its new development came, respectively, from the activities of leading Czech rural sociologist Jan Tauber, from the Institute of social and political sciences directed by Pavel Machonin, and from a group of teachers from agricultural universities in Prague and Brno. In August 1968 the progress of rural sociology was interrupted by the invasion of Warsaw Pact Troops, and a considerable number of sociologists were thereafter prevented from working in their field. Although even during this period some limited activities in the domain of rural sociology continued, they were distorted by dogmatism and interference from the state and Communist Party leaders. Despite this a new generation of rural sociologists nonetheless managed to emerge. The democratic revolution in November 1989 established new conditions that enabled the resumption of activities in the field of rural sociology, allowing them to evolve freely.
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The renaissance of Czech sociology at Palacký University in Olomouc began in 1962, when, on the initiative of Professor Jan Bohumil Tauber, several employees at the university became involved in research on changes in nearby villages in the district of Olomouc. A group was then formed of people interested in sociology, and these individuals laid the foundations for the advancement of sociology at the school. The centre of these activities was at the Pedagogical Faculty, and the focus was mainly on the sociology of education and youth. Another constructive force in developing the field in Olomouc was the longterm sociological study of university students that was conducted and which, beginning in 1965, became the basis for a series of seminars devoted to student personality. While in 1964 the sociology of education and youth was based in a small division of the university, in 1968 it became the department of sociology, comprised of five teachers and three internal research assistants. The department taught sociology as a supplementary course for existing study programmes, and conducted field research, put together texts and materials for sociological study, and in 1969 began publishing the journal 'Sociologica'. After the first two issues the journal was shut down, and with the onset of normalisation the department was closed and, like at other universities, some of its sociologists became targets of political persecution.
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The author of this paper summarizes his personal experience and the experience of some of his colleagues who in 1967 carried out the first stratification and mobility survey in Czechoslovakia with the totalitarian 'normalisation' 1969-1989. He divides the sociology of this period into five streams a) actively supporting normalisation, b) neutrally operating in the offical institutions, c) persecuted by 'Berufsverbot' or in other ways, d) actively operating in dissent, e) operating in exile. The paper refers on the base of personal memories prevailingly to the stream c) and argues that mainly thanks to its activities the achievements of the domestic Czechoslovak sociology in the two normalisation decades were of some significance for knowledge of what was going on in society. The author depicts how the persecuted sociologists found jobs or at least some inofficial opportunities to participate in research mostly with the assistance of institutions of other professional orientations and of the social science institutes in Slovakia, but without assistance from the part of the official sociological institutions in the Czech Lands. Further on he describes the fates of the last spiritual child of the Prague Spring - the book 'Czechoslovak Society' that - in spite of having been taken by the authorities out of bookshops and libraries and severely criticized by the normalisation ideologists - found its readers, reviewers and successors both at home and abroad.
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After the Communist Party took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, sociology, as a scientific field, was gradually abolished, both institutionally and effectively. It was excluded from the sphere of academia, expelled from post-secondary institutions, and replaced by the compulsory study of Marxism-Leninism. This article deals with the period in the 1960s when political changes in the Communist bloc and the relaxation of domestic political circumstances made it possible for sociology to be taught again at post-secondary schools, a period in which Czechoslovak sociology rapidly advanced towards international standards. This progress was abruptly interrupted by the 1968 invasion. The author uses institutional changes and individual human fates to illustrate how sociology in the pre-normalisation period was then gradually transformed into 'Marxist-Leninist sociology', and how almost all those who had played an important role in reviving Czechoslovak sociology in 1963-64 were shut out. The article aims to demonstrate two basic points: the distinct way in which academic sociology in Czechoslovakia evolved in comparison with other countries in the Soviet bloc (especially Poland), and the relevance of this historical lesson for the younger generation today. The article is based on testimony from participants involved in these events, individual memories, and on records and sources dating from the period under observation.
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During the normalisation period in Czechoslovakia in the years 1969-1989, empirical sociology was reduced to monitoring information relevant for Marxist-Leninist ideology. With the exception of politically neutral fields, the data gathered were distorted. Central decision-making authorities, however, needed some information on the opinions of the population. To this end, certain questions were inserted into politically neutral surveys. Data acquired in this manner, however, were only available as a source to the propaganda section of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. This article, which draws on a text that the authoress originally wrote under a pseudonym for the exile journal 'Testimony' describes these practices. At the initiative of figures in Czech exile, in 1986 a public opinion research study was secretly carried out using a questionnaire with 85 questions on a sample of 342 people, focusing on a comparison of attitudes towards the USSR, the USA, and NATO, and towards prominent politicians in the late 1980s. The results revealed a surprisingly high degree of awareness about alternative, unofficial, and thus banned culture and publications, and about certain suppressed individuals. The empirical data was sent secretly to Paris and there processed by the sociologist Zdenek Strmiska.
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This article presents a synopsis of the development of the Czech sociology of industry between 1965 and 1989. It briefly describes the reconstitution of this sociological sub-discipline in the context of the renewal of Czech sociology in the second half of the 1960s. In the main section of their text the authors survey the activities of various institutions that focused on the sociology of industry after the 1968 Soviet invasion and look at the subsequent 'normalisation' (de facto the politically motivated liquidation) of the Czech social sciences and sociology. As part of the political reprisals against reform-minded sociologists, many of them were not allowed to continue their professional careers at academic institutions, such as the universities or at the Academy of Sciences, and they frequently chose to refocus on the politically less prominent field of industrial sociology. The article concentrates on those non-academic institutions where it was possible to conduct work in the field of industrial sociology: the Institute for Research on Engineering Technology and Economics (VÚSTE), the Institute for Social Analysis (ISA), and some other worksites that existed as branches of research institutes subordinate to different specialised ministries. The authors provide brief descriptions of the main research projects carried out by Czech industrial sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, an outstanding example of which was the project on non-material working conditions, conducted by the Czechoslovak Institute for Research on Work and Social Issues (CSVÚPSV) and comprising seven sub-projects. The authors also offer a more detailed study of the research projects conducted at the Institute for Social Analysis, such as the socioeconomic analysis of one industrial district in northern Bohemia severely affected by an extreme concentration of heavy industry.
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Regardless of the role religion plays in the world today, i.e. despite the significant de-privatisation of faith in the socio-cultural space and in politics, contemporary Czech sociology of religion is in rather poor shape. The author presents a number of factors to explain this, including the legacy of the communist regime, and low levels of church attendance in the Czech Republic, the latter having been erroneously interpreted as non-religiosity. But the author focuses mainly one other reason: the discordant legacy of Czech pre-communist sociology of religion and the neighbouring field of social studies. Two different traditions of the subject are identified - the 'profane' sociology of religion, founded by T. G. Masaryk, and Catholic religious sociology. Although the former legacy declared itself non-religious and even anti-clerical, in the case of many of its followers this claim was only partially true. In the 1930s and 1940s, when they (especially Prague's sociological school, which formed a certain opposition to Masaryk) turned more towards Durkheimian attitudes, they emphasised, for example, their own religious experience as a necessary tool for understanding piety. On the other hand, Catholic religious sociology was closely related to church activism, policy, and contemporary social work, i.e. strictly conservative and anti-modern. Its way of understanding modern society was discounted by the former group of scholars, though to at least some degree the two legacies shared similar methodological approaches. Both certainly seem outdated today, but their theoretical and methodological discussions and their findings remain of importance. Consequently, a re-thinking of these legacies and their theoretical backgrounds is still significant for the sociology of religion today.
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The author of the article sets out from the assumption that the historical-sociological reconstruction of the development of sociology in Slovakia in 1959-1989 has several specific features. The first is that scholars specialising in the history of sociological thought tend to focus on earlier periods in the evolution of Slovak sociology and on the study and preservation of the intellectual legacy of figures who were sidelined, not only during normalisation (1970-1989) but even before. The second feature is that the personal memories of and contributions to the study of the process of the revival and institutionalisation of Slovak sociology after 1959 are still primarily provided by participant figures. The third is the peripheral position occupied by Slovakia in the Czechoslovak state, far from the centre of political power. The historical-political factor of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, further reinforced by the rivalry between Czechoslovakism and Slovak nationalism, is pervasive, and must be taken into account if an accurate assessment is to be made of the numerous excesses of normalisation, even in the development of Czechoslovak sociology. In this article the author characterises the two stages of institutional development of sociology in Slovakia in the period of really-existing socialism: 1) re-creation and growth between early 1960's and 1968; 2) initial repression and gradual diversification between 1970 and 1989. The second stage is subdivided into three periods: a) normalisation; b) the professionalisation of sociology and the creation of its socio-technical establishment function (1975-1985); and c) the pluralisation of Slovak sociology, i.e. growing polarisation between its pro- and anti-establishment orientations (1985-1989).
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