Scientific Communism

Religion and science were fundamental aspects of Eastern European communist political culture from the very beginning, and remained in uneasy tension across the region over the decades. While both topics have long attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, they almost invariably have been studied discretely as separate stories. Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe is the first scholarly effort to explore the delicate interface of religion, science and communism in Cold War Europe. It brings together an international team of researchers who address this relationship from a number of national viewpoints and thematic perspectives, ranging from mysticism to social science, space exploration to the socialist lifecycle, and architectural heritage to pop culture.

Engels declared at Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery that "just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history". Scientific socialism was the term Engels used to describe Marx's socio-economic philosophy and many later theorists sought to reinforce Marxist theory with a supposedly scientific basis. This book explains the development of the idea of scientific socialism through the 19th and 20th century from its origins in Engels to its last manifestation in the work of Althusser. It provides a detailed analysis of Engel's own conceptualisation, the impact of Darwin, the relationship to the 'official' historical materialism of the Soviet states and later reformulations by Althusser and others. In so doing it provides a vivid intellectual history of Marxist and socialist thought, exploring its significant insights as well its manifest failures. Marxism and Scientific Socialism will be of particular interest to those with an interest in the development of Marxism and socialism, political ideologies and the history of Western political thought.

The book explores the intellectual history of Bulgaria between the 1960s and the 1980s at the intersections of the country's social and political history. Based on case studies, the research delves into three areas: the control and pressure mechanisms used on science and the university; the clash of ideas while performing the formal and hidden functions of academia in a communist regime setting; the processes whereby research and academia acquire a relative autonomy and alternative academic communities are being formed amidst the eroding ideological legitimacy of the regime. Centred on the concept of the "incident", this setup allowed us to eschew the narratives around the role of the dissidents or "freedom as a gift" and interpret society's transformation as the outcome of intersecting and overlaying sectoral events, which gathered strength down the years and lay the ground for the eruption labelled here as the "Big Event of 1989".