a very long and very negative review<\/a> of Dragojevi\u0107's book. In this text, which will be much shorter than Pand\u017ei\u0107's review, I will consider his review and the question of who Dragojevi\u0107's book is really for.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\nPand\u017ei\u0107's arguments are problematic. What is it that Pand\u017ei\u0107 holds against Dragojevi\u0107? First, that he uses \"\u0160uvar's vocabulary\", i.e. that he uses expressions such as \"the restoration of capitalism\" or \"use and exchange value\" (Pand\u017ei\u0107 2024: 1-2). However, these are not \u0160uvar'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 \u0160uvar or Yugoslavia, these terms are still used. Each intellectual field has its own jargon. Pand\u017ei\u0107 says that this jargon is legitimate, but that it is \"doctrinaire and obsolete\" (Pand\u017ei\u0107 2024: 2). That really means that it is not legitimate. For Pand\u017ei\u0107, the entire book is unfortunately \"colored in a Marxist way\" (Pand\u017ei\u0107 2024: 2) which disqualifies it intellectually, as if some of the greatest historians and historical sociologists of the twentieth century \u2013 like Eric Hobsbawm, Immanuel Wallerstein or Giovanni Arrighi \u2013 were not themselves Marxists and leftists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, there are certain alleged methodological problems. Here, Pand\u017ei\u0107's comments would make more sense, but one should keep in mind that Dragojevi\u0107 is a journalist and not a scientist. This book belongs in the genre of current affairs, while Pand\u017ei\u0107 evaluates it as if it was nuclear physics. Other authors are free to write different books about \u0160uvar, 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 Bakari\u0107, the most important politician of socialist Yugoslavia, in 2011 (Mujad\u017eevi\u0107 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 Dragojevi\u0107's is important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u0160uvar 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 (Pand\u017ei\u0107 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the other things that Pand\u017ei\u0107 holds against Dragojevi\u0107 are also not convincing. For example, he objects to writing in the first-person plural (\"As we have said...\", \"We feel...\" Pand\u017ei\u0107 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 Pand\u017ei\u0107's taste. He also criticizes Dragojevi\u0107 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 Pand\u017ei\u0107 argument that Šuvar's origin is the Zagora region. But, Pand\u017ei\u0107 argues, it's not that Šuvar's origin<\/em> is from Zagora, but that he is<\/em> actually from Zagora, since he was born in Imotski (Pand\u017ei\u0107 2024: 6). In his desire to list all the things which irritated him in Dragojevi\u0107's book, Pand\u017ei\u0107 committed even this to paper. <\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\nOf course, Pand\u017ei\u0107 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 Pand\u017ei\u0107 does not like Dragojevi\u0107's political views or those of \u0160uvar. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There may, however, be another reason. Pand\u017ei\u0107 may feel the need to defend the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, which was a target of \u0160uvar's polemics, some of which appear in Dragojevi\u0107'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 \u0160uvar would call it \"petty bourgeois.\" Insiders can say more about this than me, but there can be no doubt that the tensions between \u0160uvar and his colleagues at the department, where he himself was also employed, were serious. Therefore, I would again say that other motives prevail. Maybe Pand\u017ei\u0107 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this does not mean that I think that Dragojevi\u0107 has covered everything that he should have or could have. For example, I would like it if he wrote more about \u0160uvar'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 Pand\u017ei\u0107 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u0160uvar. But again, that is another book. That is the book that I wish Dragojevi\u0107 wrote. But he has the right to choose what kind of book he wants to write. I think that a fair amount of Pand\u017ei\u0107's critique is based on that: Pand\u017ei\u0107 wanted Dragojevi\u0107 to write a different book about \u0160uvar. Or maybe, not to write anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
References<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDragojevi\u0107, R. (2024). \u0160uvar: politi\u010dka biografija<\/em>. Zagreb: Srednja Europa.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMujad\u017eevi\u0107, D. (2011). Bakari\u0107: politi\u010dka biografija<\/em>. Zagreb: Plejada.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPand\u017ei\u0107, J. (2024). I poslije \u0160uvara \u2013 \u0160uvar!, Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association<\/em> (21): 0-18, https:\/\/hrcak.srce.hr\/clanak\/462567<\/a> <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ove je godine novinar Rade Dragojevi\u0107 pod naslovom \u0160uvar: politi\u010dka biografija, u izdanju Srednje Europe, objavio knjigu o tom komunisti\u010dkom politi\u010daru (Dragojevi\u0107, 2024). Rije\u010d je o prvoj knjizi koja je posve\u0107ena Stipi \u0160uvaru i njegovoj politi\u010dkoj karijeri. Jednu od prvih recenzija napisao je Josip Pand\u017ei\u0107, sociolog s Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu (Pand\u017ei\u0107, 2024). Pand\u017ei\u0107 je […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1346,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions\/1346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analihpd.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}