The idea for this book came from the pleasure we derived from reading another publication – the Czech edition of In Defence of History (Argo, 2019) by the well-known British historian Sir Richard J. Evans. We were inspired by many things including a passage where the English historian describes his own work on the cholera epidemic in Hamburg and its “interweaving narrative and causal argument” (p. 130, London 2012). Evans describes how he gradually approached the final structure and how he searched for the right way to best explain the story and its causes: in the end he decided against a simple chronological story and instead created twelve parallel causal narratives which he skillfully interweaved in order to explain the causes of this phenomenon. He also used a large number of sources while simultaneously being able to generate a growing sense of suspense and excitement. He later talked about his approach in general terms: “Most historical narratives consist of a mixture of revealed, reworked, constructed and deconstructed narratives from the historical past and from the historian’s own mind. We start with a rough-hewn block of stone, and chisel away at it until we have a statue. The statue was not waiting there to be discovered, we made it ourselves, and it would have been perfectly possible for us to have made a different statue from the one we finally created. On the other hand, we are constrained not only by the size and shape of the original stone, but also by the kind of stone it is; an incompetent sculptor not only runs the risk of producing an unconvincing statue that does not much resemble anything, but also of hammering or chiselling too hard, or the wrong way, and shattering the stone altogether.” (p. 133, London 2012)
One would imagine an attempt must have been made at something like The Czech Lands in Medieval Transformation. This was part of a trend in our medieval archaeology and medieval studies, which was encouraged after 1989 by a contemporary context characterized by a belief in the restart of Czech society and its return to Europe. However, all of this would have easily led nowhere had it not been for a reckless promise, following which The Czech Lands in Medieval Transformation found itself in the publication schedule of the Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny Publishing House, where it would remain for a long time, gradually losing credibility.
It wasn’t a direct route which led me to writing about Czech politics in the 1990s, i.e. about material which interests me a political scientist as well as historians of contemporary history. Part of this was due to my first main professional interest in political parties – remarkable beasts which experienced a great renaissance after 1989. Nevertheless, when I think about the matter my writing was more of a ‘by-product’ of my personal development during this remarkable period. For people of my age group (born in 1975), this was a very understandable initial experience. This is probably why I am sensitive about sweeping judgments which describe the first post1989 years in a completely negative way, which is very visible in Czech public debates today.
Unlike the majority of the authors in this book, I am only an occasional historian. After studying history and political science at Masaryk University, my interest in the 20th century and contemporary politics led me closer to the latter discipline. In spite of this, since my student days I’ve wanted to link these two disciplines, which I believe could lead to a fruitful symbiosis for a number of good reasons. I will attempt to present some of them in this essay. I have much in common with Timothy Garton Ash and his ‘history of the present’ approach.1 Although this does not fit in with mainstream ideas about the social sciences today, I try to reflect on and write about this kind of history of the present in my teaching and research.
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