How Does Eastern Europe Generate Ideas?

In the twentieth-century era of the national state, many national modernizers in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia experimented with scholarly canons and scientific novelties for better and for worse. Empirical science about societies and economies — was their pivotal resource. The common language was surveys, questionnaires, models, and aggregate numbers that diverse nations and communities creatively adapted to recover, develop, and modernize. During the world economic crisis of the early 1930s, which further undermined the post-World War One liberal international order, national modernizers began to recognize their difference while downplaying their perceived deficiency vis-à-vis the West. This talk will focus on the unique intellectual ferment of the Great Depression era in Poland and, more broadly, post-Versailles East Central Europe, to show how histories of “elsewhere”–peripheral, rural, and poor nation-states–moved to the center of global affairs and social science.

This event is co-organised by Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia and the Study of Central Europe seminar series at UCL SSEES