V.J. Chalupa

On Post-Modern Politics

WHY SHOULD AN AMERICAN READ THIS PAGE?

Actually, there are two reasons.

The first one is the contents of the book. It is a unique, if not the only complete theory of politics in the postmodern era. It introduces new terms describing its new features: the decentralized totalitarianism in politics, the reverse solidarism in economy, the way to comply with the people’s will after having achieved control over forming its contents, the suppression of natural human duties through international expansion of unalienable human rights.

The second one is the background of the author. While most scholarly books are written in the quiet of the writer’s study, this book grew in the midst of the most important upheavals of the last century, in which the author was an active participant. Born in Czechoslovakia, in the era of dictatorships the only democratic country all of Central and East Europe, as a student he volunteered for military service during the Munich crisis and joined the military underground ON after the occupation and dismemberment of the state. In connection with the closing of Czech universities he spent almost a year in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen in Germany. After release he rejoined the remnants of his underground organization, attended a business school to learn accounting and cost accounting and found a job in a bank where he was also given the responsibility of preparedness against air attacks. This function which required day and night presence in the bank gave him a cover for regular meetings of a group of ON. After the defeat of Germany, Chalupa completed his studies of Law by obtaining the LLD; he founded a Section for Scientific Politics and became chairman of the brain trust of the president of the strongest democratic (i.e. anti-Communist) party in Czechoslovakia. After the communist putsch in February l948, it was back to the illegality. He initiated cooperation of anti-Communist socialist underground groups under the name of Czechoslovak Labor Party. After his flight to Paris in l949 he was employed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the same time he assumed the organizational responsibilities in the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute in Exile with 12 branches in 9 countries and significant publication activities. After immigration to the United States in 1952 he returned to banking and became, in due time, the Chairman of MACIB (Mid-America Committee on International Banking in Chicago) and chairman of NACIB (National Council of Committees on International Banking in New York) representing American international banking during world-wide meetings at the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. He became member and vice-president of the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the chairman of its foreign affairs Committee; as such he represented that organization at the follow-up meeting of CCSE in Vienna.

After the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Chalupa secured, by donating his archive and obtaining other activists’ archives, the establishment of a Center for Exile Studies at the Palacky University in Olomouc and  already in l990 initiated the founding of the International Institute for the Study of Politics at the Masaryk University in Brno. He edited its Czech and English monthlies and wrote its first reader Fundamentals of Political Science. After his behind-the-scenes attempts to spoil the parliamentary approval of the break-up of Czechoslovakia failed, he returned to his original interest in the theory of law and to arranging his manifold experiences into an orderly and logical theory covering the changes which have in the meantime occurred in politics, economy and international relations, changes in which he, in a modest way, participated. This book is the result of these efforts, and the comments on world events its follow up.