The issue of migration among the rural population living on the lands of the Czech Crown in the early modern age continues to attract only marginal attention in Czech historiography. Therefore, those people who lived on the very edge of that society remain outside the scope of research interest. The Romany Gypsies who were bom without homes, lie also outside the traditional focus of attention. In the early modern age, anyone could kill a Romany Gypsy without punishment; people were meant to despise them and were even supposed to persecute them. The Romany Gypsies were therefore forced to develop a specific strategy of action, which was intended to help them survive, and a significant role in this strategy was played by migration. A condition for survival was not only the need to maintain a strong internal structure within the Romany Gypsy group, but also the need to create ties with a settled society. These ties ensured, in the case of a threat, at least some form of a rudimentary protective social network. Such ties were probably passed down from generation to generation and the Romany Gypsies therefore, as much as was possible, restricted their movements to only well-known areas. On their travels through the landscape they tried to obtain food not only through begging and theft, but also by telling fortunes and reading palms, skilfully taking advantage of the fact that in the eyes of the settled population their lives were cloaked in mystery. However, they never forgot to emphasise their ties to the land in which they were bom and the impossibility of leaving it for another land. A question remains for further research as to whether they were persecuted for their ethnic origin or whether it was because of their nomadic lifestyle, which enabled them to evade the mechanisms of social control.
Studie se věnuje problematice podnikového managementu a úskalím „socialistické kontroly“ v československých podnicích v období pozdního socialismu. S využitím pramenů Komunistické strany Československa a Státní bezpečnosti, dobových textů a odborných publikací ukazuje, jak se stranické a státní orgány neúspěšně snažily učinit z kontroly funkční nástroj realizace hospodářské politiky státostrany. Autor analyzuje používané kontrolní mechanismy a nastiňuje základní příčiny až fatálního selhání kontrolní činnosti systému, jenž byl svým způsobem kontrolou doslova posedlý. Vysvětluje systémovou podmíněnost kontroly, kterou socialističtí manažeři dokázali v mnoha ohledech přizpůsobit potřebám svěřených hospodářských jednotek, což přirozeně nekorespondovalo s celospolečenskými zájmy. Na příkladech řady konkrétních kauz studie názorně ukazuje, že si československý podnikový management v osmdesátých letech dvacátého století plně uvědomoval systémové, politické i společenské limity kontrolní činnosti, kterou vcelku úspěšně dokázal přizpůsobit vnitropodnikovým podmínkám. Výsledkem byl stav, kdy stranické vedení reagovalo na stále očividnější symptomy „agonie centrálně plánované ekonomiky“ přijímáním rozmanitých směrnic a direktiv pro zefektivnění kontroly a důsledné prosazování zásady „kdo řídí - kontroluje“. Očekávaný efekt ovšem nenastal a nefunkčnost kontroly přispěla nakonec nemalou měrou ke zhroucení komunistického režimu v Československu., The study deals with issues of corporate management and pitfalls of the "socialist supervision" in Czechoslovak enterprises in the period of late socialism. Using documents of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the State Security, period texts and specalized publications, it shows how party organs and state authorities were unsuccessfully trying to make supervisory mechanisms and audits a functional tool of the implementation of the ruling party´s economic policy. The author analyzes the supervisory and audit mechanisms that were used, and outlines basic reasons of the almost fatal failure of supervisory activities of the system which was, in a way obsessed with supervison and control. He explains the systemic conditionality of the supervisory system which socialist managers often and in many respects bent to suit the needs of the enterprises they were in charge of; such situation naturally did not match the needs of the society as a whole. Using many specific cases as an example, the study graphically shows that members of the Czechoslovak corporate management community in the 1980s were fully aware of systemic political and social limitations of the supervisory system which they managed to modify, fairly successfully, to suit intra-corporate conditions. The result was a situation in which the party leadership was reacting to increasingly obvious symptoms of the "agony of the centrally planned economy" by adopting various directives and guidelines to make the supervisory process more effective and to consistently promote the "whoever manages - supervises" principle. However, the anticipated effect did not materialize and, at the end of the day, the non-functional supervisory mechanisms made a substantial contribution to the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia., Tomáš Vilímek., and Obsahuje bibliografii a bibliografické odkazy
The Grounds of Concrete Logic (Základové konkretné logiky) is often taken to be a work in which Masaryk attempts to outline, in a methodical way, his conception of philosophy as “a real scientific metaphysics”. Nevertheless, we often hear from the Masaryk’s critics, and even from his followers, that the book appears to be no more than a transcription of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Even if the classification of the
sciences was one of the main philosophical and scientific problems with which Masaryk was engaged throughout his life, in the emphasis on concrete sciences, and in the working out of the relations between particular sciences and categories, Masaryk goes beyond Comte. This point is supported, at the same time, by the many critical notes concerning the inadequacy of Comte’s epistemological grounding, which Masaryk links, above all, to a critique of Comte’s phenomenalism. The specific quality and the critical reference of the book for future generations of Czech philosophers consists in its principled status and realist aim. Concrete logic should bring us to the ultimate ontological points of departure – to things themselves. In his prioritising of the need to seek the sense of things, Masaryk belongs to the modern thinkers who showed to Czech philosophy new possibilities and ways of approach to reality in a strictly scientific spirit.