THE RENEWAL OF CZECHOSLOVAK DEMOCRACY AND CZECHOSLOVAK TRADITIONS OF POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHY

The common opinion that the anti-totalitarian revolution in central and Eastern Europe in 1989 was simply a return of this part of Europe to the tried and tested liberal democratic system is very superficial. Like George orwell and Hannah Arendt, who were distinguished not only by their outstanding intellectual but also by their personal experience of totalitarian regimes, the Czechoslovak political philosophers (T. G. Masaryk and Jan Patocka) also achieved a much more profound analysis and conclusions through investigating the tensions between the sources of democracy and totalitarianism. For Masaryk the central point was the increase in knowledge about the indispensable spiritual and moral foundations of democratic institutions. The democratic constitutional system is truly legitimate since it provides a sphere which allows and supports unreplaceable individual morals, coherently reforming concepts of the meaning of life and the world; in Masaryk's terminology religious democracy. In Masaryk the influence of both the Czech tradition of political philosophy (Havlicek, Palacky, Comenius) and of Tocqueville and Mill's conception of democracy as a way of living is obvious. The fundamental philosophical sphere of Masaryk's understanding of politics was their spiritual and moral anchoring in Plato's thought. Plato's philosophy was also the starting point for the political philosophy of Jan Patocka who drew on Plato's concept of ideas which called for a transcendence of more existing things and objects. Experience of freedom and internal life are consequently indispensable for understanding human life. Patocka therefore sees the intellectual foundation of the origin of Europe in Plato's theme of concern for the soul. From the historical intensification of metaphysics in the technical age and the totalitarian systems, Patocka focused on the starting point of the solidarity of those who were shaken in their belief in the common meaning of ''life'' and ''peace''. Thus Patocka's existential neosocratism of warnings and prohibitions provided the foundation for the civic initiative Charta 77 which, became the moral and spiritual precondition of the revival of Czechoslovak democracy. In the context of contemporary western discussions on the legitimacy of democracy, the recent developments in Czechoslovak political philosophy could usefully contribute to overcoming the modem propensity to limit concepts of democracy to the research fields of sociology and political science.