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The ambiguities of intellectual dissent in late socialism: the case of Bulgaria

Medarov, Georgi, Stoyanova, Veronika (2024) The ambiguities of intellectual dissent in late socialism: the case of Bulgaria. Journal of Political Ideologies, . pp. 1-19. ISSN 1356-9317. E-ISSN 1469-9613. (doi:10.1080/13569317.2024.2382450) (KAR id:106792)

Abstract

The old totalitarian paradigmFootnote1 – the model still commonly deployed across Central and Eastern Europe and beyond to describe and explain state socialism – painted an image of socialist regimes as autocratic and all-powerful systems of total control imposed on a paralyzed mass of people, where only heroic individuals resisted. The dominant interpretations of intellectual dissidence correspondingly still often overlook internal inconsistencies, tensions, and pluralism which characterize resistance in late socialism. In this contribution, we focus on intellectual work at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1970s and 1980s to trace some of the ways in which the totalitarian narrative and its key binary dissidents-system fails to capture the complexities of political and intellectual life in late state socialism. We show that a peculiar type of anti-totalitarianism – characterized more by pluralism and internal tensions – could be ascribed correctly to critical social science during the period, but rather than as a critique of state socialism, it should be understood as a critique of the alienating aspects of industrial modernity and should be contextualized in the nascent consumer-oriented transformation of actually existing socialism after the shift from heavy to light industries and the processes of destalinization after the 1960s.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/13569317.2024.2382450
Uncontrolled keywords: state socialism
Subjects: H Social Sciences
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research
Funders: University of Kent (https://ror.org/00xkeyj56)
SWORD Depositor: JISC Publications Router
Depositing User: JISC Publications Router
Date Deposited: 05 Aug 2024 13:49 UTC
Last Modified: 06 Aug 2024 10:47 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/106792 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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