of the whole, especially economic interests, over particularist interests or ‘soft factors’. The carrying out of the project, however, fell mostly into the stormy period of the second half of the 1960s and the oil crises of the 1970s, which were characterized, at least in western Europe and some liberal democratic countries elsewhere, by the crisis of organized modernity, the growing criticism of the original modernist consensus, and the gradual breakdown of that consensus. Non-economic factors, including the natural environment and preservation of cultural heritage, and the lack of consideration for the particularist interests of various social groups, including individual generations, sexual minorities, and people of different skin colour from that of the majority. In the 1980s, the distinguished German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) proposed the term ‘reflexive modernity’ for a qualitatively different form of modernity, one which had undergone the criticism and crises of the 1960s and 1970s and had also been affected by the transformation of the labour market which led to a loss of certainty.135 Beck’s analysis importantly contributes to charting the changes in politics, society, and thinking in the last third of the twentieth century. It is also a fundamental starting point for this book. The question of the extent to which the ‘second crisis of modernity’136 and its new, ‘reflexive’ character were manifested in the nature of late socialism and what influence this global transformation had on its ultimate legitimacy crisis, certainly merits greater attention than historians have so far paid it. It is worth noting at this point that the changes in the discourse about the destruction of the old Most and the building of the new one in the 1970s and 1980s underscore the usefulness of Beck’s and Giddens’s analyses also when applied to the 135 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. The term ‘reflexive modernity’ or ‘reflexive modernization’ is also used by Giddens, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. 136 Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity, pp. 123–71.
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socialist dictatorships. Perhaps better than from anywhere else we can see from Hněvín Hill how the elites and society of Czechoslovakia were wrestling with the crisis of organized modernity, whose starting points and forms had given state socialism a considerable portion of its legitimacy in the course of a few decades. The changes in the strategies by which the whole experiment was justified to the public, and also its criticism (openly permitted or illicitly in samizdat) can at least begin to explain the causes of the breakdown not only of the consensus in normalization Czechoslovakia but also of state-socialist domination in eastern Europe in general.
Two Stories about Technology, Power, and Freedom To the extent which man leaves the products of his past labours to operate as natural forces, with a consequent withdrawal of human labour power from the immediate production process, there enters into production a far more powerful force of human society, science as a productive force in its own right […] The more man gives up the jobs that he can leave to be done by his handiwork, the wider the prospects opening up before him – prospects that would have been inaccessible without the backing of his own achievement. (Radovan Richta et al., 1966 137 ) We live in a society where people have in many respects become alienated from the human way of life (which applies also to ourselves) and where many structures and processes have alienated people, that is, have been 137 Radovan Richta et al., Civilizace na rozcestí: Společenské a lidské souvislosti vědeckotechnické revoluce, Prague: Svoboda, 1966, pp. 26–28. Published in English as Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, trans. Mariana Šlingová, Prague: International Arts and Science Press, 1967, p. 27. See also the work of Vítězslav Sommer, for example, ‘Scientists of the World, Unite!: Radovan Richta’s Theory of Scientific and Technological Revolution’, in Elena Aronova and Simone Turchetti (eds), Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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emancipated, have become dislocated from their original purpose, which was to serve, and have been repeatedly dragging people into situations that they cope with only with great difficulty and great sacrifice – or no longer cope with. (Ladislav Hejdánek, 1978 138 )
Let us fast-forward directly to the events we are concerned with: the surface mining of coal over a vast area for the generation of heat and electrical energy, to which a whole historic town fell victim, and a modern urban area that had to be built because of that mining; the systematic moving of all the inhabitants and the moving of selected historic monuments; machines eliminating old Most; machines taking away the overburden; machines extracting raw material; machines, in a few steps, transforming raw material into electrical energy; machines reclaiming the devastated landscape. What was it all for? It was so that the energy obtained could drive other machines in factories or in households. And perhaps also so that people could lead better lives. The Most project is the convex mirror of a key aspect of modern civilization, that is, technology, which became an instrument of progress in the hands of human beings but also an independent power. The most general, and perhaps most essential, level of inquiry about the events that are the focus of this book thus concerns the interpretation of the influence that technology has had on individual human beings and society. It is a question no less important than whether the modern age, by means of science and technology, has contributed to the liberation or to the enslavement of humankind. I am under no illusion that this book, or any other, offers a definitive clear-cut answer. It is even likely that this particular story, despite 138 Ladislav Hejdánek, Filosofie a politika: Patnáct let nepolitické politiky, Prague, 1978. This is a samizdat collection of articles written from 1963 to 1978. Quoted in Václav Tollar, ‘Emancipáty a problém lidských práv’, in Martin Šimsa (ed.), Nepředmětné výzvy české filosofie: K myšlení Ladislava Hejdánka, Ústí nad Labem: Univerzita J. E. Purkyně, 2013, pp. 333–57, here, p. 348.
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