By: Elzbieta Matynia

Elzbieta Matynia — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 01:49:00 +0000

Thank you for this so much! Milan, a brilliant scholar and teacher, had
shared the ethos of the New School’s founding fathers, taking seriously the
responsibility of the social scientist vis–a-vis society and the world at
large, and acting on it. This gifted sociologist and wonderful
human being was a good friend of the New school, and TCDS. We were lucky to discover him soon after the
Velvet Revolution in early 1990, when he was finally reinstated at Charles University, and was about to become the Dean of
the Social Science Faculty there. He visited the New School, gave an
engaging talk on society and its literature, and then — along with Alena Miltowa –
became head of the Prague Branch of the Democracy
Seminars, an early transregional collaboration that we coordinated from the
New School. One of the international meetings of the Democracy Seminars took place near Prague, in Celakovice, in an empty facility that 5 years earlier had served as a place for training middle-level
party cadres…. Some of the presentations from those meetings appeared later in Grappling with Democracy: Deliberations on
Post-Communist Societies (1990-1995). The book was published by the new
publishing house SLON, dedicated to bringing to the country social science
literature that had been absent for decades. I certainly hope that his own
book, “An Alternative: Thoughts on the Position of Sociology in a Society
without Alternatives”, will find its way to an English-language publishing
house…

Comments on: Miloslav (Milan) Petrusek (1936 – 2012)

By: Elzbieta Matynia