The Crisis of Modernity:
Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era

Karel Kosík

Preface to the American Edition	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Editor’s Introduction	1

Chapter 1 Reason and Conscience	13
Chapter 2 Our Current Crisis	17
Chapter 3 Socialism and the Crisis of Modern Man	53
Chapter 4 The Dialectics of Morality and the Morality of Dialectics	63
Chapter 5 Hašek and Kafka, or, the World of the Grotesque	77
Chapter 6 Švejk and Bugulma, or, The Birth of Great Humor	87
Chapter 7 The Irreplaceable Nature of Modem Culture	101
Chapter 8 Culture Against Nihilism	103
Chapter 9 Three Observations on Machiavelli	105
Chapter 10 Illusions and Realism	109
Chapter 11 The Weight of Words	113
Chapter 12 Neruda’s Enigma	117
Chapter 13 The Individual and History	123
Chapter 14 On the Czech Question	135
Chapter 15 The Nation and Humanism	137
Chapter 16 On Censorship and Ideology	143
Chapter 17 What Is Central Europe?	147
Chapter 18 “Two Thousand Words” and Hysteria	181
Chapter 19 On Laughter	183
Chapter 20 Havliček’s Principles of Democracy	199
Chapter 21 The European Left	203
Chapter 22 The Blindness of Sheer Faith	205
Chapter 23 Intellectuals and Workers	207
Chapter 24 A Word of Caution on Workers’ Councils	209
Chapter 25 The Only Chance—An Alliance with the People	211

Notes	217
Select Bibliography	231
Index	235
About the Editor	239

SOURCE: Kosík, Karel (1926-2003). The Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era, edited by James H. Satterwhite. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. xi, 239 pp. Contents: pp. vii- viii.

Note: On Hašek and Kafka, inter alia with respect to Kosík, see also:

Steiner, Peter. The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. See esp. chapter 1: “Tropos Kynikos: The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek,” pp. 25-68.

And see:

Karl Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, edited by Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2021. (Historical Materialism Book Series; 243)

Reviewed by Isabel Jacobs, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 4 September 22.

Karel Kosík, Czech Marxism and the Dialectics of the Concrete, streamed live, Oct. 13, 2022 (1 hr, 45 min)