Anna Saunders

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (aswell as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular. "It is impossible, after reading this volume, to still give any credit to those who claimed that 1989 was a revolution without ideas, or could not be a revolution because it offered no ideas. We should be grateful that a new generation of scholars—most of whom not burdened by the assumptions and affinities that have inhibited participants and contemporary observers—can look with a cool eye both at the thinking that accompanied radical change and at the sometimes bizarre amalgams that have furnished political language in the last quarter-century in East Central Europe." - Padraic Kenney, Professor of History and International Studies, Indiana University "This is the most comprehensive and balanced intellectual history so far available of post-communist East Central Europe, and it is particularly instructive on the diversity of the field. The book is essential reading for those who want to know how the multiple transformations of the region were understood from within." - Jóhann P. Árnason, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, La Trobe University,Melbourne

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (aswell as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.

"It is impossible, after reading this volume, to still give any credit to those who claimed that 1989 was a revolution without ideas, or could not be a revolution because it offered no ideas. We should be grateful that a new generation of scholars—most of whom not burdened by the assumptions and affinities that have inhibited participants and contemporary observers—can look with a cool eye both at the thinking that accompanied radical change and at the sometimes bizarre amalgams that have furnished political language in the last quarter-century in East Central Europe." - Padraic Kenney, Professor of History and International Studies, Indiana University

"This is the most comprehensive and balanced intellectual history so far available of post-communist East Central Europe, and it is particularly instructive on the diversity of the field. The book is essential reading for those who want to know how the multiple transformations of the region were understood from within." - Jóhann P. Árnason, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, La Trobe University,Melbourne

Gillian Jein, Laura Rorato & Anna Saunders (2017) Introduction: city
margins, city memories, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 25:4, 405-411,

The mainstream imagination of the European city is commonly based around a cultural
topography of the ‘centre’: the urban ‘core’ in which power, history and collective social life
is performed. These identities are most readily articulated through the stereotypical itineraries
of the tourist, and perpetuated in the monikers of Paris as the city of lights and love,
Berlin as a city of war and walls and Milan as the city of fashion and food. While these clichés
have their roots in the material histories of each city, they become potential tools in the era
of neoliberal marketing for the instrumentalisation of the past. This packaging of the past
potentially neglects the experience of those who do not conveniently fit the promotional
image of the city. But, in its complexity and mobility urban space defies clichés, and as such
has continuously been the site of tensions between governmental and planning ideals of
coherence, order and continuity on the one hand, and the realities of the city as a complex
assemblage of subjectivities, societies and environments in flux on the other. The three
cities—Berlin, Milan and Paris—discussed in this special issue each provide different contexts
for the exploration of this complex, multilayered fabric of urban life. As the articles gathered
here demonstrate, the question of what it means to live, and what life means in the contemporary
European city is often most fiercely debated, contested and decided at the edges ofthe neoliberal hegemonic centre.