At its inception, the philosophical journal Praxis was merely the successor to Pogledi, a political journal issued from Croatia's capital, Zagreb, in the 1950s. Pogledi was a casualty of state interference: It lasted only three years. Chief among the defunct journal's contributors had been the University of Zagreb sociologist Rudi Supek, who participated in the French Resistance as an émigré during World War II and later led an underground prisoners' organization when he was interned at Buchenwald; and the University of Zagreb philosopher Gajo Petrovic, a Serb from Croatia who gravitated toward the early Marx, existentialism, and Heidegger. Birnbaum remembers, "Supek and Petrovic were impressive for their moral rigor, their utter disdain of careerism. They were people you loved to be around." From the ashes of Pogledi, Supek, Petrovic, and their colleagues went on to start their summer school on Korcula in 1963 and a new journal, Praxis, in 1964. The group that formed around these ventures consisted of a close-knit circle of friends and colleagues--some from Supek's and Petrovic's departments at the University of Zagreb and another eight from the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade.

That summer was particularly memorable at Korcula. Richard Bernstein, now a political philosopher at the New School for Social Research, recalls, "Everybody who was a significant leftist, in the East or in the West, came to the 1968 meeting. All the leaders of the student movements in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States were there." But even as the editorial boards of Praxis and The New Left Review sunned themselves on the beaches of Korcula, the Belgrade 8 held on to their jobs by a slender thread. With this history in mind, Tito’s regime walked a fine line between a strong central state, which was by and large favored by Serbs, and a loose confederation of republics, which was generally favored by Croats and Slovenes. Centralism prevailed in the early postwar years, but momentum started to build in the other direction in the mid-1960s. A new set of constitutional arrangements slowly took shape, offering greater autonomy to each republic. But this did not appease those who favored a looser confederation. A Croatian nationalist movement was born of the sentiment that the reforms of the late 1960s had not gone far enough. Among the activists’ grievances was that Croatia, which was more industrialized and generally wealthier than Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, carried more than its share of Yugoslavia’s economic burden. Extremists advocated Croatian secession. Students, intellectuals, and even local Communist authorities gathered around a Croatian cultural society called Matica Hrvatska until Tito disbanded the group, purged its participants from political life, and arrested student leaders.By this time, Mihailo Markovic was clearly the Yugoslav group's leader, and he came to play a crucial role in the revived journal. A fluent English speaker, he was gregarious, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Both his anti-Stalinist and his antifascist credentials were impeccable: He had fought in Tito's Partisan army during World War II and prided himself on extending aid to Yugoslav Jews. In his philosophical work, Markovic emphasized Marx's commitment to human dignity, freedom, and self-realization. Markovic took a harder line: “Our tragedy lies not in the fact that this or that person was head of the state. Our tragedy lies in the fact that the great powers have decided to destroy our country.” “This unexpected, indeed astonishing, alignment of Praxis editors with nationalism,” Branka Magas wrote, “delineates a complete break with the political and philosophical tradition represented by the journal.” Ivo Andric with Dobrica Cosic, date unknown. Yet Mr. Kundera's title also refers to the many diverse things that can betray art as a testament. He includes, for instance, the translators who have failed to respect Kafka's use of word repetition and who insist on showing off their skills

Yugoslavia, despite Tito's bold initiatives, fell far short of this ideal. In Yugoslavia's hybrid economy, the much-touted self-managing enterprises were exposed to market pressures, on the one hand, and capricious state control, on the other. Regional oligarchies took root: In the end, local power brokers manipulated and ignored workers' councils in much the way managers do everywhere. But the Praxists saw these problems as evidence that self-management had not gone far enough. They were at once self-management's most passionate exponents abroad and the Yugoslav system's fiercest internal critics. Furthermore, whatever else the Praxists were, they were Marxists. In Croatia, to go on being a Marxist — or a Yugoslavist — placed one in opposition to the right-wing nationalist regime of Franjo Tudjman. And indeed, many of the Croatian Praxists have remained strong supporters of human rights: Zarko Puhovski, who is now vice-president of Croatia’s Helsinki Committee on Human Rights, has raised his voice courageously against the Croatian army’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns. And the economist Branko Horvat ran for president in 1992 on an antiwar, anti-authoritarian platform. In this piece, Laura Secor explores the appeal of a new, emancipatory socialism, Praxis’s efforts to resist ethnic identities, and the roots of Yugoslavia’s descent into the abyss. The following was originally published in the excellent (but sadly defunct) literary magazine Lingua Franca in 1999.

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History, the Praxists urged, “is made neither by objective forces nor dialectical laws; it is made instead by people, who act to transform their world within the limits of historical possibilities.” So wrote Sher in 1977. In the precarious decade to follow, the Praxis philosophers would indeed transform their world. But the way they did so was not, at that time, imaginable to academics in the West. Who could have known that one of the Praxis philosophers would later become vice president of Milosevic’s party — and its chief ideologue during the Bosnian war? Or that another member, once a passionate critic of nationalism, would sign a 1996 petition calling for the Hague to drop war-crimes charges against the brutal Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whom the petition dubbed “the true leader of all Serbs”? But Zivotic and his followers made their real reputation as peace activists. During the war years, the Belgrade Circle expanded to include a motley array of workers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and artists. At its height it had five hundred followers, who convened every Saturday for public events geared toward interethnic dialogue and peace. Cosic and Stojanovic were open to various solutions: Croatian independence might have been acceptable, Stojanovic implies, if Croatia had been willing to guarantee substantial autonomy to its Serb-populated territories. In practice, critics would object, such solutions were untenable. There would be autonomy for the Serbs in Croatia; and within that autonomy, should there be autonomy for the Croats in Serbian Croatia? And what, then, of the Serbs in Croatian Serbian Croatia? It is tempting to see this line of reasoning, which leads ineluctably to a reductio ad infinitum, as a sophistic device whose real purpose was to force Yugoslavia’s reintegration on Serbian terms.

The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group's disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. "One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate," he recalls. The rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s were disappointing years for the Belgrade 8. They organized what they called the Free University, which mostly consisted of seminars held in private homes, but they could not advertise these meetings, and they were constantly on guard for police interruption. At least one Free University session convened at the novelist Dobrica Cosic's house. Neither a Marxist nor a philosopher, Cosic was a personal friend and shadowy influence on the Praxis group although never an actual member. In the 1980s, his ties to Praxis pulled tighter; but to what extent the Praxists already shared his incipient nationalism remains a mystery. Cosic collaborated with Tadic on two projects in the early 1980s: One, a proposed journal that would criticize bureaucracy and champion freedom of expression, was immediately suppressed by the government; the other, a petition against censorship laws, was also swiftly defeated. The government press denounced Cosic and his Praxis friends as "hardened nationalists and open advocates of a multi-party system," but the group continued to convene as a committee to promote freedom of expression.As the 1973 issue of Praxis neared press time, Puhovski was on his own: the editorial board split seven to one in Cosic’s favor. For more than a decade, the Belgrade 8--Mihailo Markovic, Svetozar Stojanovic, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Miladin Zivotic, Nebojsa Popov, and Trivo Indjic--wandered the globe, accepting visiting professorships abroad and meeting secretly in Belgrade. Only Indjic accepted the government's offer of a low-profile post at an institute. The others insisted on nothing less than a full return to the University of Belgrade, which was not forthcoming. Markovic, the group's best-known member abroad, took a part-time philosophy post at the University of Pennsylvania. Stojanovic taught at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas. Meanwhile, in Zagreb, the situation was slightly less dire. "There were pressures," remembers Zarko Puhovski. "I couldn't publish for two years. But it was nothing remotely like the situation in Belgrade."

Liberated from fascism by partisan struggle, after 1945, socialist Yugoslavia claimed to offer an alternative to the bureaucratic Soviet model. Although Communist leader Josip Broz Tito remained firmly in command until his death in 1980, his party promised equality among the nationalities, workers’ self-management in industry, and a degree of cultural freedom unparalleled elsewhere in the socialist world. Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, “the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism.” Sher’s dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group’s yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term “Praxis” and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously anti-humanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic. So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists’ admirers when three key members of the group — Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic — signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo’s autonomous status — something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its “unselfish” aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians’ interests to heart. Ominously, the petition’s authors intoned: “Genocide [against Kosovo’s Serbs] cannot be prevented by … [the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo … to Albania: the unsigned capitulation which leads to a politics of national treason.”The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group’s disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. “One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate,” he recalls.