The year 2025 marks the 95th birthday and 35th anniversary of the death of philosopher and essayist Milan Šimečka. It also marks the 115th birthday and 50th death anniversary of Alexander Matuška, a literary scholar, critic, and non-party politician. This is reason enough to honour the work of these two important intellectuals and dedicate an issue of Studia Politica Slovaca to them (No 2/2025).
The Czech Milan Šimečka (6 March 1930 – 24 September 1990) who lived and worked in Slovakia since 1954, was one of the most respected dissidents in Czechoslovakia during the so-called normalisation period in the 1970s and 1980s. His most important works from the 1970s and 1980s are The Restoration of Order, Community of Fear, Our Comrade Winston Smith, All-round Defence and Big Brother and Big Sister, written with his friend Miroslav Kusý. In these works, Šimečka attempted to answer why the normalisation regime was so stable. In his political diary The End of Stillness (Konec nehybnosti) written in the late 1980s, Šimečka described the decline of the Czechoslovak normalisation regime. However, it would not do Šimečka justice to limit his work to the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1960s, he published in magazines such as Kultúrny život, Literární noviny, Reportér, Literární listy, Doba, Listy, Slovenské pohľady, Matičné čítanie and worked for radio and television. In the late 1960s, he commented on the Czechoslovak reform process, the “Prague Spring”. Šimečka’s most important philosophical and political science writings from the 1960s include The Social Utopias and the Utopians and The Crisis of Utopianism. In these writings, he confronted utopias and utopian thinking with the reality.
During the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, Šimečka was one of the intellectual protagonists in Slovakia. Until his early death in 1990, his work focussed on (European) political and cultural traditions, the development of a democratic political culture and the problems of Slovak-Czech relations.
His political and philosophical thinking was characterised by an increasing scepticism towards ideological concepts and utopias. Interestingly, although one of the most translated Czechoslovak dissidents, he rarely has been the subject of political scientists or philosophical studies. (Most recently Dirk Dalberg’s book on the political thinking in Czechoslovak dissent in the 1970s and 1980s). Like most dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s, he (still) stands in the shadow of Václav Havel.
We welcome studies (in the field of the history of ideas and/or intellectual history) that examine the main lines of Šimečka‘s political thought (e.g., critique of the utopia, the normalisation regime, the perestroika…) and place it in the wider context of European (political) thought. Furthermore, what significance did he attach to the Czechoslovak reform process at the end of the 1960s? What did he (not) want? What ideas of a (democratic?) society did he have at the end of the 1980s? We also welcome (historical) studies examining his position in the dissent during the normalisation and the Velvet Revolution and other topics related to this exciting personality. Reception of his political thinking.
Alexander Matuška (26 February 1910 – 1 April 1975) is considered the creator of modern Slovak essayistic. He critically evaluated the national character, the worship of empty values, the fondness for the past, and the little demand on the quality of work and creative achievements.
Parts of his essays written in the 1930s and 1940s, published in journals such as Slovenský hlasy, Přítomnost, Elán, Slovenské pohľady and others, can be categorised as political essays. Some of it was republished in the volume O duchovnom kolaboranstvo [On Spiritual Collaboration] (Bratislava 2015: Marenčin PT). From 1948, he stood for the more or less successful attempt at non-ideological writing. While his literary oeuvre, which Fedor Matejov described as critical personalism, has been widely analysed, his political essay writing is rather unknown. Therefore, we encourage you to engage with the political elements in his essays but also literary work in the narrower sense.
The deadline for submitting your research paper is 30 June 2025. We accept manuscripts in Slovak, Czech and English.