A non-dogmatic Marxist who reflected on the Prague Spring
He argued that the Prague Spring was buried again after 1989, following its burial under the Husák regime.
Karel Kosík was a Czech philosopher who reworked Marxism as a philosophy of human praxis and concrete historicity. His major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), placed Marx in dialogue with Heideggerian phenomenology and earned international recognition. A leading intellectual of democratic socialism during the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from university life during normalization. After 1989, he argued that the memory and emancipatory promise of the reform had been buried first by the Husák regime and again by the neoliberal order, making him central to debates over the event’s legacy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1943–1944Joined the left-wing underground resistance Předvoj and edited an illegal journal
- 1944–1945Arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp
- 1953–1968Researcher at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy
- 1963Published Dialectics of the Concrete
- 1968–1969Professor of philosophy at Charles University and member of the Communist Party Central Committee
- 1970–1989Dissident intellectual, excluded from university life after expulsion from the Communist Party
- 1990–1992Lectured in philosophy at Charles University
- 1992–2003Researched and wrote at the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy
Related historical events
Breaking with Stalinism and the Formation of a Non-Dogmatic Marxist Circle (1950s)
Kosik worked from 1953 as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. By the mid-1950s he had abandoned the strongly Stalinist positions he initially held. Vaclav Cerny, in his memoirs, was among those who criticized Kosik's stance during the Stalin era. Yet, unlike others, Kosik did not leave Marxism itself. He took part in the activity of the Yugoslav Praxis group, which was an international forum for debate over Marxist theory, and became a member of the editorial board of its journal of the same name. Kosik gathered around himself a circle of like-minded Czech authors, including Robert Kalivoda, Ivan Svitak, Kvetoslav Chvatik, Josef Zumr and Ivan Dubsky. This group first appeared publicly at the 1958 conference on the history of Czech philosophy held in Liblice, where the reformers also gave the floor to Jan Patocka, who was not a Marxist. Patocka regarded Kosik as the greatest talent of his generation, and the two became friends around 1959. Patocka introduced Kosik in particular to the intellectual world of Martin Heidegger, an influence clearly visible in his major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963). Kosik's biographies also contain claims that the sources do not confirm. Notes on the jackets of books published in the 1990s, among other places, report that he wrote a roughly thousand-page work around 1975 that was confiscated by the State Security; Czech Wikipedia states that this is a fiction. In reality it was reading notes, chiefly of Heidegger, and the confiscated manuscript was later returned to its author.