The limits of ideas

The book explores the rounds of approval procedures and other steps that an idea had to go through on its journey from the author or a community of colleagues, via the publisher, all the way to book reviews; the personal, professional, and textual strategies of authors, their perception of censorship and self-censorship, and their negotiations with editors and other actors in scientific institutions, communities, and editorial offices; and the ways in which researchers sought to communicate their ideas to the readership. Against the backdrop of ideologically motivated scholarly policies, Czech and Hungarian historians, philosophers, literary scholars, sociologists, and non-fiction editors meet in ‘imaginary conversations’ about their work in the last two decades of state socialism. Their narratives form a typology of scholarly publishing under state socialism and serve as a ‘primary text’ for a subsequent theory of state-socialist censorship. The epilogue reflects on memories of state-socialist scholarly publishing in light of contemporary debates about the future of the humanities and the relevance of the experience of Czech ‘normalisation’ for the present day.