Original scientific paper
From Christian to Peasant Humanism: Croatian National Ideologies and Bio-Ecology
Tomislav Markus
Abstract
The author analyses the main characteristics of the research of political and national ideologies in Croatia in the nineteenth and the twentieth century from the bio-ecological point of view. Historical research and that of political sciences made valuable contributions to the better knowledge of national ideologies, but remained burdened by a humanist approach and the standard model of humanist scholarly disciplines, which ignored the ecological and evolutional framework of human life. Historians and other researchers started from the primacy of cultural adaptation, “culture-centrism” and historicism, according to which civilised and, particularly, modern man is independent of ecological and biological limitations. A similar approach was deemed valid also in the cases of the objects of their research, the most important representatives of Croatian national ideology in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. As examples of such an approach, this article analyses some elementary characteristics of the ideologies of Mihovil Pavlinović (1831–1887), and brothers Antun (1868–1919) and Stjepan (1871–1929) Radić. Their works, besides all the differences between them, are characterised by anthropocentric discourse, a progressivist view of history and a humanist view of the world, which ignores ecology and biology. The author pleads for a bio-ecological approach, which acknowledges the peculiarities of the socio-historical framework, but accepts the fact that men belong to nature and the importance of our genetic heritage, and which should be applied to the study of Croatian history – as well as the history of any other nation – in general.
Keywords
bio-ecology; national ideology; Mihovil Pavlinović; Antun Radić; Stjepan Radić; the nineteenth and the twentieth century
Hrčak ID:
7485
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2006.
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