Book Talk by Balázs Trencsényi, March 11, 15:00

This book launch will present Trencsényi’s new eponymous book, published by Oxford University in March 2025.

Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond maps the range of meanings the term 'crisis' has borne and the roles it has performed across disciplines and countries, de-centering the dominant narrative that takes Western European positions and developments as normative. It especially focuses on the historical roots of two key contemporary contesters of liberal democracy: neoliberalism and populism and presents an innovative analysis of the roots of contemporary illiberalism in Europe. Bringing these ideas into the present day, Balázs Trencsényi offers ideas on how a reflective and self-critical liberal democratic political position could be defined and defended in our current predicament, which is increasingly compared to the interwar period and is often described as a “polycrisis”.

The event is supported by the ERC Starting Grant 'Memory and Populism from Below' (MEMPOP) #101076092 and hosted by the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES, MEAE-CNRS)

Date:

15.00-17.00 (CET) on Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Location:

CEFRES Library, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. 

Or please join us online on Zoom: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89212801728?pwd=ubZv7zomvbBIwoobJ1OB0vGUDhwPEl.1

(meeting ID:  892 1280 1728; password: 605775)

About the speaker:

Balázs Trencsényi is a historian of East Central European political and cultural thought. He is currently a professor at the Department of Historical Studies at the Central European University, and the director of the CEU Democracy Institute. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project, “Negotiating Modernity”: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Among others, he is the author of the monograph, The Politics of “National Character”: A Study in Interwar East European Thought (Routledge, 2012); co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vols. 1–2 (Oxford University Press, 2016, 2018); European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (Berghahn, 2017); and Brave New Hungary: Mapping the “System of National Cooperation” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond: A Transnational History is his newest monograph, published by Oxford University Press in 2025.