Sociology During the Period of Normalisation
K sociologii v období normalizace

Summary/Abstract: The author of this paper summarizes his personal experience and the experience of some of his colleagues who in 1967 carried out the first stratification and mobility survey in Czechoslovakia with the totalitarian “normalisation” 1969–1989. He divides the sociology of this period into five streams a) actively supporting normalisation, b) neutrally operating in the offical institutions, c) persecuted by “Berufsverbot” or in other ways, d) actively operating in dissent, e) operating in exile. The paper refers on the base of personal memories prevailingly to the stream c) and argues that mainly thanks to its activities the achievements of the domestic Czechoslovak sociology in the two normalisation decades were of some significance for knowledge of what was going on in society. The author depicts how the persecuted sociologists found jobs or at least some inofficial opportunities to participate in research mostly with the assistance of institutions of other professional orientations and of the social science institutes in Slovakia, but without assistance from the part of the official sociological institutions in the Czech Lands. Further on he describes the fates of the last spiritual child of the Prague Spring – the book “Czechoslovak Society” that – in spite of having been taken by the authorities out of bookshops and libraries and severely criticized by the normalisation ideologists – found its readers, reviewers and successors both at home and abroad.

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