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Class analysis in Croatia: silences and futures

Assuming that knowledge production is deeply entwined with politics (Weiler 2009, Fourcade 2009), we theorise changes in the academic field that ensued from the political upheaval of the early 1990s as forms of conversion (Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley 2000). While overall this was a historical moment of great uncertainty (Ekiert 1996), the necessity of rejecting Marxism was clear. Stripped off its role of theory, Marxism was reinterpreted as ideology, removed from curricula, teaching and research programmes (Dolenec, Doolan, Žitko 2015, Kasapović, Dolenec and Nikić Čakar 2014). In examining why social sciences took an “anti-class turn” in the 1990s, we propose a Bourdieuian (1988) account of how, given the de-legitimation of Marxism, the rules of the game were reshaped and the discursive boundaries of legitimate knowledge redrawn. We focus on the turbulent relationship between sociology and class analysis. Banned as “bourgeois ideology” in Yugoslavia until the 1960s (Dolenec 2015), rehabilitated initially as “philosophy’s younger sister” (Šporer 2006), sociology developed into a fully-fledged empirical discipline that investigated social stratification as late as the 1980s (e.g. Lazić 1987, Sekulić 1991) – only for class analysis to disappear from the discipline in the following two decades (Popović 2009). Building on our previous work (Dolenec, Doolan and Žitko 2015), in this paper we analyse the academic conversions in the field of sociology between 1991 and today, as it witnessed both the disappearance of class analysis and its recent revival. Relying on interviews with social scientists that were academically active since the late 1980s as well as primary and secondary sources on the history of the discipline, we charter the trajectory of sociological class analysis in Croatia until its recent reinvention. In doing this, we firstly aim to identify the crucial political consequences of two decades of academic blindness to class. Secondly, we investigate the relationship between the neo-Marxian revival of class-analysis and the renewal of the political left in Croatia.

class analysis; field of sociology

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