Publication Details

Abstract

Though the results attained until now in the attempts at an analysis of the so-called personality cult are scanty, they point out many difficulties met by the theoretical approach to these important questions. The methodological-theoretical starting points are of importance. The application of some conventionally used philosophical categories is questionable (e. g., dichotomous employment of the category of „necessity“ and „chance“). The analysis of the processes of the building of socialism, particularly those connected with the first, initial period of tin socialistic building-up also under our conditions, is to be carried out by scientific methods — first of all, on the basis of a complex approach taking into account an equivalent cooperation of such social sciences as philosophy, sociology, scientific communism, history, theory of state and law etc. It is necessary to get rid of the harmfulness of the onesided factographical empiricism and, on the other hand, an aprioristic reductionism with the employment of speculative elements. In connection with the analysis of the first period of the socialistic buildingup in the ČSSR it is necessary to reason more deeply on the position and structure of the working class, its heterogeneity, political traditions and, before all, the sense of its leading position. An approach like that enables a far more functional confrontation of the criteria of the so-called external and internal factors of penetration of wrong trends into the individual areas and forms of social life, these trends being at first sectarian, later more administrative and bureaucratic and, in their essence, disfunctional and deforming. Apprehension of "the basic features of the penetration process of deforming changes presupposes a deep structural-functional analysis of the activity of the political system of socialism, in particular, of the essence and developmental tendencies of the power social relations, which makes it possible to fix a system of guarantees against possible undesirable relapses. The gnoseologico-theoretical function of the category „the personality cult“, „the period of the personality cult“ and the like is considerably confused and may serve only as a tentative work hypothesis.