Page:East European Quarterly, vol15, no1.pdf/52

 to manage self-governmental institutions in all predominately Czech communes and districts.

From the turn of the century onward, Czechs increasingly remembered Palacký more for his view of history and sense of national mission than for a number of specific policies undertaken by the very conservative National Party. This intellectual and ideological, as opposed to pragmatic influence remained paramount at least until 1948, if not beyond, and even facilitated the enactment of such progressive measures as universal suffrage, civil rights, free public education, and social reform. This may in the long run have been Palacký’s most enduring contribution to Czech and Slovak politics. To a considerable degree, his view that the Czech nation had a civilizing mission that helped justify national self-preservation and growth and his belief that the Hussite era marked the high point in Czech historical development, were increasingly transformed and transmitted by T.G. Masaryk, whose idea of the Czech question and understanding of the past owed much to Palacký. To the extent that Masaryk and other progressives sought to separate the timeless in Palacký’s thought from what they discerned to be his conservatively-oriented and outmoded political program of the sixties, they emphasized again, as Palacký and other Czech Romantics had done, the importance of ideals in politics as guides to action and as standards against which the success or failure of any policy might be judged. Also, having had more time to observe Habsburg inability to reform an antiquated political system, they, much more than Palacký, criticized the Monarchy and questioned its ability to survive.

Masaryk, to be sure, took a much more present-minded view of the past than did Palacký and reinterpreted many of his views in light of social and political problems facing the Czechs at the turn of the century. Like Palacký, Masaryk was a Protestant and an intellectual who entered politics from a successful scholarly career. He, too, thought that political activity was an important means of social service that logically continued and necessarily complemented his teaching and scholarship. He furthermore approved Palacký’s having identified the achievements and ideals of Czech and Hussite Reformation leaders as the high point in Czech history and having contended that these ideals might appropriately guide nineteenth century Czech political and intellectual development. Moreover, Masaryk, likewise desiring to arouse the Czechs to a sense of purpose larger than self-preservation or national advancement, not only endorsed Palacký’s interpretation of the past but contended that Palacký and other leading awakeners had, by reviving and popularizing the great Hussite and Reformed traditions, further strengthened and justified such democratic