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Preface This work has a long prehistory, one that proves that Alfred G. Meyer was right when he said that “in the study of human relations the inquirers are investigating themselves.” It all started at the beginning of the 1970s, when I concluded my undergraduate studies in political science in Yugoslavia, which had included taking on the role of editor in chief of a then-rebellious student newspaper, the Tribune (1968), in Ljubljana. I departed for the United States for one term to become a teaching assistant to Vladimir Dedijer (1914–90), a Yugoslav dissident, in the Department of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dedijer was a close associate and critical biographer of Tito during the Second World War and in Tito’s conflict with Stalin in 1948 but fell into disgrace in 1954 when he supported the right of Milovan Djilas, another Yugoslav dissident, to openly speak his mind. In Cambridge, Dedijer introduced me to Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, which eventually led to my graduate student–doctoral career in Harvard’s Department of Sociology. When I left Yugoslavia, my country seemed to be in the process of completing what Russian tanks had halted in Czechoslovakia in 1968 during the “Prague Spring.” The liberalization of the Communist regime had made great strides, and I shared with many intellectuals and liberal-oriented politicians in Yugoslavia a hope, one that later proved naive, that when I returned, Yugoslavia would be an entirely different country: a full-blown democracy. Two years later, after I had completed most of my doctoral requirements at Harvard and paid a visit home to gather material for my dissertation, Yugoslavia was indeed a new country, but quite unlike what I had initially expected. The liberal turn had been reversed. Instead of promising democratic changes, Yugoslavia was, politically speaking, experiencing a deep and cold winter. I will briefly discuss this gloomy period in the following pages. After my arrival home, the authorities made it clear to me that study abroad, particularly in the United States, was no longer a desirable pursuit. They soon backed up their words with deeds: I was immediately called to serve in the army. There was, however, no legal basis for this as I was already too old and had previously been excused from military service. Eventually, while performing the duty to which I had been called, I was accused of working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The “proof” they cited was a private letter to my mother in which I told her that Seymour Martin Lipset had nominated me to become a fellow (which I eventually did) at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA). After my unpleasant military service, I was forced to surrender my passport to ensure that I would make no visits to the West for some time. This bitter experience did not, however, overshadow the excellent experience that I had had—both in the intellectual as well as the human sense—at the beginning of the 1970s while at Harvard. I am grateful to a number of professors whose wisdom and highly relevant ideas shaped my intellectual journey. In particular, I need to mention Professors Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Ezra F. Vogel, who each in his own way challenged my thinking as a student “armed” with the hot ideas of the 1960s student generation. They helped me in a number of ways, some of which may be unknown to them, to come closer to the intellectual maxim of “Adequatio intellectus et rei”—“correspondence of reason to reality.” I certainly profited as a student from Professor Lipset’s course on intellectuals and as his teaching fellow in two courses, Students and Politics, and Bias and Bigotry (he taught the second course with Professor David Landes). From Professor Bell, I obtained very useful knowledge in the area of social forecasting and classical social theory, the latter in connection with my role as a teaching fellow in his course Marxism and Classical Social Theory. Professor Vogel encouraged me to seek out valid sociological thought in the writings of Communist dissidents, which were often left to oblivion or considered merely political “raw material,” particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—though for obvious reasons. I still remember, for example, the intensive discussions we had about the sociological relevance of the theory of the “new class” as exemplified by Milovan Djilas and a number of others who followed his lead. My appreciation and...

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