This year, the publisher Srednja Europa published Rade Dragojević's book Šuvar: A Political Biography, about the communist politician (Dragojević 2024). This is the first book about Stipe Šuvar and his political career. One of the first comprehensive reviews was written by Josip Pandžić, a sociologist from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (Pandžić 2024). Pandžić has written a very long and very negative review of Dragojević's book. In this text, which will be much shorter than Pandžić's review, I will consider his review and the question of who Dragojević's book is really for.
Pandžić's arguments are problematic. What is it that Pandžić holds against Dragojević? First, that he uses "Šuvar's vocabulary", i.e. that he uses expressions such as "the restoration of capitalism" or "use and exchange value" (Pandžić 2024: 1-2). However, these are not Šuvar's words but the vocabulary of the time and the vocabulary of the left. It is entirely legitimate to use these expressions and concepts. In today's Marxist and socialist discussions, which have no connection to either Šuvar or Yugoslavia, these terms are still used. Each intellectual field has its own jargon. Pandžić says that this jargon is legitimate, but that it is "doctrinaire and obsolete" (Pandžić 2024: 2). That really means that it is not legitimate. For Pandžić, the entire book is unfortunately "colored in a Marxist way" (Pandžić 2024: 2) which disqualifies it intellectually, as if some of the greatest historians and historical sociologists of the twentieth century – like Eric Hobsbawm, Immanuel Wallerstein or Giovanni Arrighi – were not themselves Marxists and leftists.
Additionally, there are certain alleged methodological problems. Here, Pandžić's comments would make more sense, but one should keep in mind that Dragojević is a journalist and not a scientist. This book belongs in the genre of current affairs, while Pandžić evaluates it as if it was nuclear physics. Other authors are free to write different books about Šuvar, about his education reform or anything else mentioned in this book. In Croatia's public sphere, we have far too few books about important figures from Croatian and Yugoslav politics. We only got our first book on Vladimir Bakarić, the most important politician of socialist Yugoslavia, in 2011 (Mujadžević 2011). Who knows how much we will have to wait for the next one. So, in such a slow and impoverished academic field, a contribution like Dragojević's is important.
It makes little sense to disqualify this book because it does not fit some checklist that somebody got at a doctoral program. For those who have a simpler motivation, that is, to learn about Yugoslav socialism, especially the seventies and eighties, to read something about Šuvar which is not just a quick rejection because of the allegedly catastrophic education reform, or to put contemporary political problems and ideological discourses in a longer perspective, this book is quite useful. Methodology is, of course, important. But to speak of some super rigorous biographical method (Pandžić 2024: 2-3) is exaggeration. It is not like the author did not conduct reliability tests for his qualitative coding scheme or robustness checks for his quantitative multivariate models. I am not trying to insult biographers, but on this terrain there are no such methodological standards.
Some of the other things that Pandžić holds against Dragojević are also not convincing. For example, he objects to writing in the first-person plural ("As we have said...", "We feel..." Pandžić 2024: 4). That may not be a practice to everyone's liking, but it is not something to explicitly criticize. Then, the language used is too informal for Pandžić's taste. He also criticizes Dragojević for including longer quotes from several interlocutors (sometimes up to several pages) or that he uses his own experience as a pupil who survived Šuvar's education reform. Those who sees such things as problematic are being pedantic. The same can be said of Pandžić argument that Šuvar's origin is the Zagora region. But, Pandžić argues, it's not that Šuvar's origin is from Zagora, but that he is actually from Zagora, since he was born in Imotski (Pandžić 2024: 6). In his desire to list all the things which irritated him in Dragojević's book, Pandžić committed even this to paper.
Of course, Pandžić has every right to be irritated by this book. Everybody has their tastes and preferences. It seems that what is at play here is that Pandžić does not like Dragojević's political views or those of Šuvar. Of course, that too is entirely legitimate. But, it seems that what is really a political disagreement is being camouflaged into an intellectual and methodological one. The whole review is written in such a way that as many arguments as possible are used in order to achieve something that is not necessarily connected to methodology or to writing style. And that is the disqualification of leftist ideas, especially those connected to socialist Yugoslavia. All the noise about methodology is munition for that purpose.
There may, however, be another reason. Pandžić may feel the need to defend the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, which was a target of Šuvar's polemics, some of which appear in Dragojević's book. This department earned a certain reputation, which it still has to a degree, of being connected to (neo)liberal ideas. In socialist times, one would say that Zagreb sociology was "bourgeois", while Šuvar would call it "petty bourgeois." Insiders can say more about this than me, but there can be no doubt that the tensions between Šuvar and his colleagues at the department, where he himself was also employed, were serious. Therefore, I would again say that other motives prevail. Maybe Pandžić feels the need to continue this fight and defend his department. I can understand this, but as an intellectual argument, it does not amount to much.
All of this does not mean that I think that Dragojević has covered everything that he should have or could have. For example, I would like it if he wrote more about Šuvar's education reform. I would say that this topic is still very much alive. Indeed, it is quite contemporary. Everywhere, we can see the need to link practical and academic knowledge and avoid overspecialization. In addition, since Pandžić is a sociologist, he knows how popular Pierre Bourdieu has become in sociology. Bourdieu insisted on the inequalities generated and legitimized by the education system. This is now an entire academic cottage industry.
So, we could use at least one more serious study about the effects of the education reform on the pupils themselves, given that the mere mention of the topic in public generates strong reactions from those who did not like Šuvar. But again, that is another book. That is the book that I wish Dragojević wrote. But he has the right to choose what kind of book he wants to write. I think that a fair amount of Pandžić's critique is based on that: Pandžić wanted Dragojević to write a different book about Šuvar. Or maybe, not to write anything at all.
References
Dragojević, R. (2024). Šuvar: politička biografija. Zagreb: Srednja Europa.
Mujadžević, D. (2011). Bakarić: politička biografija. Zagreb: Plejada.
Pandžić, J. (2024). I poslije Šuvara – Šuvar!, Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association (21): 0-18, https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/462567
