Larson, Jonathan LCritical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 576 one could draw out the dynamics of a system that somehow, unwittingly, primed the people to cope not just with the frustrations of one-party socialism but also, after a few adjustments, with the shock of multi-party capitalism. That said, this book should serve as the definitive introduction to the period for all newcomers, as well as an indispensable reference for country experts. Drake University Kieran Williams Larson, Jonathan L. Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism. Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2013. xx + 240 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£60.00. In this book, anthropologist Jonathan Larson presents a welcome addition to the scholarship on contemporary Slovakia, which is under-represented in studies of the post-socialist region. Larson attempts to tackle the difficultto -pin-down concept of critical thinking. In order to delimit his object of inquiry, Larson reaches to comparison. He defines critical thinking as a practice common in US education and public discourse and seeks to examine if a similar practice exists in Slovakia and what its specific forms are, noting early in the Introduction: ‘I first noticed a discourse on critical thinking in the late 1990s, not among Slovaks but among Western agents of democratization and educational development’ (p. 3). While the framing of the project thus risks appearing ascriptive, imposing a phenomenon conceptualized in a different national and cultural context on Slovak realities, Larson successfully demonstrates that Slovakia has its own indigenous forms and discourses of critical thinking which can be witnessed in a number of spheres. Larson’s study thus presents a Slovak contribution to the now substantial literature challenging the ‘transition paradigm’, which understood post-socialist countries as emulating Western models. In order to explore the development of his object of inquiry, Larson conducted ethnographic research in schools and institutional settings, as well as a discourse analysis of relevant media to analyse the status of public debate in Slovakia. Through a number of well-chosen case studies, the author demonstrates what constitutes critical thinking in the Slovak context. The first chapter studies two journals that professed to offer critical commentary on current social, political and cultural issues. Noting that ‘different kinds of Slovak intellectuals — writers, commentators and educated professionals alike — shared a frustration with the state of critical thought and civic criticism after the collapse of Communist rule’ (p. 55), Larson shows that such REVIEWS 577 complaints were voiced across the political spectrum; critical thinking itself has no inherent political alignment, as the examples from his two journals illustrate, although its perception as a cornerstone of liberal democracy was shared across the board. The second chapter broadens the field of enquiry to a more general public sphere, in which Larson illustrates the critical legacies of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ and demonstrates that post-socialist public criticism was often framed in a moralistic discourse. Questions of accountability for past behaviours during the socialist period played a defining role for the kind of legitimacy public intellectuals could claim after 1989. Particularly useful in this chapter is Larson’s analysis of what he calls the shifting semiotics of the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’: as those who were often in opposition to the previous regime rose to hold political office after 1989, their inclusion into the former category shifted into the latter, with repercussions for the kind of criticism they could voice. In the Introduction, Larson posits that the ‘perceived national underdevelopment’ (p. 7; italics in original) relates to understandings of critical knowledge and discourse as a problem of Slovak culture and history. Chapter three helpfully and convincingly elucidates this cultural and historical context by discussing the meanings of the public practice of criticism and self-criticism in socialist Czechoslovakia, which constituted an important means of legitimation for the ruling Communist Party. The placement of the chapter however raises questions about the organization of the book. How did inherited understandings of criticism and self-criticism from the socialist period affect the development of post-1989 critical discourses? It seems that this question forms an indispensable background to Larson’s enquiry and answers to it would have helpfully informed the discussions in chapters...