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Philosophy Lecture and Pizza Night
November 29 at 5:00 am - 7:30 pm
Join us for an engaging philosophy lecture and enjoy some pizza and beverages while you listen!
Our speaker is Associate Professor of Philosophy Dr. Manuela Ungureanu who will present on the topic “Recent Historiography of the Former Soviet Bloc: The View from Social Ontology”.
Abstract
Already in the late 1980s, historians of the Soviet Union found Cold War analytical concepts of total control, repressive institutions, cynical indoctrination or mass mobilization more of a hindrance to their accounts of related socio-cultural phenomena.
The sudden collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe 35 years ago brought their analytic questions about the framework introduced by Friedrich’s and Brzezinski’s work close to the core of the social sciences for the whole region’s recent past. With massive amounts of archival materials open for interpretation, many historians of the former Soviet bloc have decried what they perceive as politically biased accounts of the region’s societies.
But what Fulbrook, or Kocka (on the former GDR), Connelly (in comparative historiography of the Soviet bloc) or David-Fox (on the former Soviet Union) seem all captivated by can be summarized as questions with a distinct philosophical ring: Where lie the explanatory limits of totalitarianism analyses of people’s lives in the Soviet bloc? Which social-theoretical frameworks offer more promising starting points, and for what kind of empirical findings?
Dr. Ungureanu appeals to a more abstract description, in social ontology, of norms for collective action and/or institutions in order to defend the standpoints of their preferred accounts and preserve some of the earlier insights of the totalitarianism paradigm.
No registration is required. All are welcome.
