Utopia and Democracy

Zsolt Czigányik is the lead scholar of the 'Democracy in East Central European Utopianism' research group at Central European University funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and an Associate Professor at ELTE University, Budapest. He published Utopia Between East and West in Hungarian Literature with Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.Iva Dimovska holds a PhD from Central European University's Gender Studies Department. Currently, she is a Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in the 'Democracy in East Central European Utopianism' research group at CEU's Democracy Institute in Budapest. She is also a member of the Utopian Studies Society Steering Committee.

• Part I. Forging New Ways Forward: Rethinking the Relationship between Utopia and Democracy.- 1. Utopia and Democracy: Is There a Way Forward?.- 2. Utopian versus Utopian. The Ambivalence of Utopia and the Oxymoron of Utopic Democracy.- 3. A Utopia of Fear? The Reappraisal of Utopian Thought in Contemporary Realist Political Theory.- 4. Dreams of a Final Normative Theory: An Essay on the Changing Role of Utopia in Contemporary Political Thought.- Part. II. Utopia(s) in Praxis: Contexts, Projects, Communities.- 5. Aristotle On Citizenship, Scholē And Democracy.- 6. Uchronia as the Foundation of Utopia.- 7. Outlines of an American Conservative Utopia: The Case of Russell Kirk.- 8. ‘‘The Only Real Democracy is Direct Democracy’’: An Exploration of the Concept of Democracy in Two Italian Contemporary Utopian Communities.- Part. III. Between East and West: Utopia and Democracy in Eastern/Central Europe.- 9. Democracy and Leadership in Nineteenth Century Hungarian Utopian Literature.- 10. Utopia and Nationalism in Pre-War Yugoslavia.- 11. The phenomenon of New Soviet Man: Utopian Aspirations of Bolsheviks and Their Subsequent Downfall.- 12. Democratic Futures, Utopia and the Literary Imagination of Contemporary Ukraine.