We are pleased to let you know that, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched, the comprehensive volume of ours, The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), has been made open access.
The book is available for free download via this link: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46598
(In case the link does not work, here is an alternative link: https://www.postcommunistregimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021.09.10.-Magyar-Madlovics-The-Anatomy-of-Post-Communist-Regimes.pdf)
The book was published in English by CEU Press last year, and this year the Hungarian and Russian translations will come out (by summer and by fall, respectively). A Spanish edition is also in the making, and it should be available in print in early 2022.
For further information and supplementary material to the book (including an interactive 3D model of post-communist regime trajectories), please visit https://postcommunistregimes.com/
Opinions about the book:
Masha Gessen, Staff writer journalist, The New Yorker: “Reading this book feels like having the curtains opened, letting the bright light come in. Everything becomes visible and clear. The experience of living in mushy political reality gives way to unsparing, exact analysis. What comes into focus may not be pretty, but having it illuminated, ordered, and explained is incomparable.”
Henry Hale, Professor, George Washington University: “This ambitious book provides not only a better vocabulary but a whole new grammar for describing the political regimes that emerged in communism’s wake. Exposing how conventional frameworks continually mislead, Magyar and Madlovics demonstrate the potential for innovative theory to yield piercing new insights into the reality of politics in the postcommunist world and, indeed, beyond.”
Alena Ledeneva, Professor, University College London – London’s Global University: „The authors adopt a structuralist approach, driven by language. They tackle the complexity and multidimensionality of post-communist regimes not simply by cataloging existing concepts but by relating them to each other and constructing a broader, overarching framework: a new language for post-communist regimes. (…) The conceptual, methodological, and semantical innovations will undoubtedly produce an abundance of reactions among scholars, students, and readers yearning for orientation in the complex world of post-communist realities.”
Jan-Werner Mueller, Professor, Princeton University: “Many social scientists and historians have been puzzled by what is now often called a ‘global democratic recession’. This conceptually highly innovative analysis provides terms and theories that are crucial for making sense of our historical moment.”
Iván Szelényi, Professor Emeritus, Yale University: “I have been in the business of ‘varieties of post-communist countries’ since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, this book is better and more important than anything I have done during the past 30 years in two important respects: 1) it carries a far greater number of countries with the most impressive empirical knowledge of their changes of the past decades; 2) it has a far more sophisticated theoretical framework than anything I could develop.”