Why So Easily . . . Some Family Reasons for the Velvet Revolution

A Sociological Essay

Ivo Možný, Phil Jones, Phil Jones

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9788024653174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A famed essay examines the Velvet Revolution from a sociological perspective. Thirty-two years after its initial publication, this respected sociological essay, written in the history-making years of 1989 and 1990, is available for the first time in English. The essay tells the story of a despotic Socialist state expropriating the family (and with it the private sphere of life) only to be colonized by the very thing it expropriated forty years later. The essay plunges the reader into the pivotal time of the Velvet Revolution and provides valid explanations for the grassroots causes of the old regime's downfall, examining the private aspirations and strategies of highly disparate groups of nameless social actors of the old regime that eventually sapped almost everyone of any interest in keeping the regime afloat.

Table of contents

• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the second edition – What we didn’t know ten years ago
• Preface to the first edition
• Chapter One – Why so late?
• Chapter Two – How could it have happened so smoothly?
• Chapter Three – Now what?
• Postscript
• Bibliography