Liberating the Nation from ‘Fear Psychosis’: Trust, Citizenship, and the Politics of Emotion in Postwar Czechoslovakia, 1945-1948

• In Event: Liberation between War and Communism: Revising the History of the Czechoslovak Third Republic, 1945-1948

Abstract

This paper explores how state-sponsored public opinion polling efforts sought to both win public trust, and make it scientifically legible, against the backdrop of a ‘trust deficit’ crisis imperiling postwar reconstruction in Czechoslovakia’s Third Republic. Drawing on exciting new approaches in histories of emotions and the social sciences, this paper argues that pollsters in Czechoslovakia worked to fix emotions into quantifiable units that could be transferred into tangible policy ambitions and interventions of sociologist-turned-politician Edvard Beneš’ ‘new’ democracy. More broadly, the paper asks how the vision of mass participation in economic and political life, and an inclusive democracy, were reconciled by social scientists with the widespread postwar climate of fear and mutual suspicion, and a body politic that excluded communities from its vision of idealized trustworthiness. In doing so, it points towards the important political role of sociologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in reconstruction efforts and nation-building in postwar eastern Europe.

Author

• Alexander Langstaff, New York U