Una Blagojevic

Una Blagojevic's work aims to reconstruct the dense political language that has been historiographically and historically described as "Marxist humanism." The project engages with Marxist humanism and its relation to the context in which it was articulated, those articulations themselves, the interlocutors of this political language, and its shifting horizons of expectation. The focus is on following the intellectual development of Marxist humanist intellectuals—or more generically, "critical Marxists," denoting their distinction from the "official Marxist" circles of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY)—centered around the journal Praxis and its associated Korčula Summer School, both of which existed between 1963 and 1974. Therefore, the crux of this thesis focuses in depth on the years of the existence of Praxis, taking into consideration the developments that preceded it (and thus made it possible) as well as its intellectual epilogues. While the existing literature has centered on the turn towards nationalism by some members of Praxis, this research proposes to explain the intellectual changes of Praxis philosophers and sociologists in a contextual manner. Blagojevic’s aim is to show how the critical edge of Praxis, situated in Yugoslavia, and transnationally connected with Western Marxism, was shifting at different moments within the examined time frame.