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Debating a Debate That is No Debate? Censure, Publication, and the Contexts of a Moral Order in Slovakia's Velvet Revolution
Author(s) -
Larson Jonathan L.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01053.x
Subject(s) - denunciation , politics , moral order , public sphere , context (archaeology) , sociology , order (exchange) , media studies , law , political science , social science , history , finance , economics , archaeology
During the “Velvet Revolution” of late 1989 into the early 1990s, members of a Slovak lettered class fought over political influence by contrasting their own alleged moral rectitude vis‐à‐vis the socialist past and postsocialist present with that of their political rivals. Through published acts of denunciation and attempted censure that drew authority from the particular print venues in which they appeared, these intellectuals sought to control the moral terms of a postsocialist future. This article explores the politics of public censure and accusations of “unfair debate” to argue that in a context such as intellectual debates that rely on the print media of cultural periodicals, the truth contexts that these journals represent create, or perhaps even encourage, conditions for the contestation of political claims. [truth, disputes, public sphere, print media, Europe]