The pushing through of the idea to destroy the historical town of Most and to build a modem town of the same name nearby, as well as the carrying out of this idea, took place in Northern Bohemia between 1960 and 1980....The pushing through of the idea to destroy the historical town of Most and to build a modem town of the same name nearby, as well as the carrying out of this idea, took place in Northern Bohemia between 1960 and 1980. The immediate cause and chief argument for implementing the whole project was the fact that the old town was located on large supplies of lignite （brown coal）. On the basis of the archival research of this ＂great experiment＂, substantial theses and questions can be formulated. Primarily, the justification of the destruction of a Medieval town and a construction of a new urbane centre was dominated （rather than by communist utopia） by economic and technocratic thought. It was the logics of quantitative calculation, and financial gains and losses, which enforced the plan and shaped the practice of destruction and construction. In this context, the role of the humanistic socialist discourse of justice and good life has to be inquired. This traditional thought was used to back up the technocratic decision as well as to articulate intellectual critique of the whole project. It is especially this ambivalent relationship between the two modernist discourses （the technocratic and humanistic thought）, which constitutes the core of this paper.展开更多
基金This article originated within the postdoc project P410-12-P596 ＂Velky, experiment socialisticke moderny＂ （The Great Experiment in Socialist Modernity） supported by the Czech Science Foundation （Grantova agentura Ceske republiky）.
文摘The pushing through of the idea to destroy the historical town of Most and to build a modem town of the same name nearby, as well as the carrying out of this idea, took place in Northern Bohemia between 1960 and 1980. The immediate cause and chief argument for implementing the whole project was the fact that the old town was located on large supplies of lignite （brown coal）. On the basis of the archival research of this ＂great experiment＂, substantial theses and questions can be formulated. Primarily, the justification of the destruction of a Medieval town and a construction of a new urbane centre was dominated （rather than by communist utopia） by economic and technocratic thought. It was the logics of quantitative calculation, and financial gains and losses, which enforced the plan and shaped the practice of destruction and construction. In this context, the role of the humanistic socialist discourse of justice and good life has to be inquired. This traditional thought was used to back up the technocratic decision as well as to articulate intellectual critique of the whole project. It is especially this ambivalent relationship between the two modernist discourses （the technocratic and humanistic thought）, which constitutes the core of this paper.
