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NAVIGATING THE POSTWAR LIBERAL ORDER: AUTONOMY, CREATIVITY AND MODERNISM IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA, 1949–1953

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2018

JAMES M. ROBERTSON
JAMES M. ROBERTSON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Irvine E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 385 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

Early drafts of this article benefited from the insights of participants in the Reading Race in Cold War Cultural Internationalism seminar at the 2018 ACLA and the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Seminar on East Europe at Vanderbilt University. The author would also like to extend thanks to Susan Morrissey, the editors of Modern Intellectual History and the three peer reviewers for their careful and critical engagement with this piece.

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