I was very pleased with the public statement of Professor Budil (anthropologist and historian) that the publication of my book Breached Enclosure has opened a whole new discussion in the Czech environment. Until then, economic and social neoliberalism had been a totally dominant doctrine and there was no criticism of it other than that which was based on the positions of the previous (Communist) model, which of course cannot be a strong criticism. A return to the past is never an alternative. The breaking of the walls showed that the current neoliberal model can be analysed and criticised from a completely different angle, and others joined in with their own ideas and insights, and in this way completely original thinking emerged in the Czech environment.
I don’t want to open up about my role in this, but I follow the discussion in the Anglo-American world, I absorb a lot of valuable ideas, but I see that there are many Czech insights missing. And for my part, I would add to this that real common growth of ideas is not about membership in the same association or common discussions, but about people reading each other’s texts and thinking about them.