The 'left' and the 'right' are two terms that often appear and tend to be used in everyday conversation, the media, and scientific discourse. In most theories on political orientation the terms left and right are used as theoretical concepts that facilitate the description and classification of social reality. This usage of the concepts is justified and can be very useful. However, at the empirical level they are often used with the aim of detecting and examining them in connection with what people think. In this article the author describes a series of analyses that indicate that when the left-right concept of political orientation is tested and assessed such usage proves misguided. The author employs 'immediate validation' in the article's analysis, an original method still under development that is part of the broader stream of cognitive approaches applied in survey methodology.
Since the debate on the past and present of Central Europe among
emigré writers and intellectuals in the 1980s the urban history of Central and Eastern Europe has become a vivid research field in the German and English historiography. It also went alongside with the ‘spatial turn’ in historiography which claims an importance of space in historical analysis. The review essay discusses three books by two German and one American scholar representing three different perspectives on urban history in the ‘age of extremes’: the city as a space of experience (Lviv), the city as a palimpsest (Grodno) and the microhistory of a city through the lens of a tenement and its residents (Warsaw). All three books demonstrate that urban history beside or even because of its methodological eclecticism off er important insights into the history of society. It illuminates processes of integration, exclusion and annihilation on a local level and integrates them into a macrohistorical analysis as well as into the history of modern social, cultural and political identities and loyalities, emphasising their situativity and fluidity. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou