This paper brings a short overview of the history of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, the publisher of the journal Philosophy and Society. The first issue came out in 1987 as a collection of essays, and for the last eight years it has been published annually. In 2005 it became a journal with three issues per year, becoming quarterly since 2011. The article gives a review of all special topics covered in the journal up until the end of 2012. In addition, the article provides a detailed analysis of the journal’s special issue on Antifascism (IV/1993). We argue that this issue is an important historical document in the changing social atmosphere of the former Yugoslavia, with the first signs of its disintegration. The papers were initially presented at a conference held on 2, 3 July, 1991.

The immediate motive for organizing the Belgrade symposium “Socialism and Culture” held in late 1969 were prohibitions. After June 1968 there were about forty political interventions in Serbia (while there had been none in the previous twenty years), considerably more than in other Yugoslav republics. The conclusion that was reached was that cultural life was provincialized and underdeveloped. The author in this paper extends the topic to a more global level since the intentions of the dialogue allowed for that. Data on Goli Otok, provided by Milovan Đilas, fit well with these facts. The Otok was the most drastic and dramatic prohibition in the entire history of the Second Yugoslavia. From both contemporary and presentday perspectives, the symposium may be interpreted as a cry for freedom. In this conversation, the members of the Belgrade wing of the Praxis group played a crucial role. Some of these same people would later participate in the events infamously marking the 1990s, above all the civil and religious wars. The Zagreb “headquarters” of Praxis was, on the contrary, never affected by the nationalist virus. Finally, arguments are proposed about Dobrica Cosic as the Serbian Faust, and the thesis of this writer being the Father of the Nation is contested.

Political history of the Second Yugoslavia was continuously sacral, while secularization mainly took place within the arts’ domain. The Cominform (Informbiro) and split with the SSR opened up a space for greater freedom of creativity (Kardelj, Đilas, Segedin) and for the abandonment of the socialist realism and its attempt to control the content of art (Zogovic). A third position on literature was promoted by Vladan Desnica.

The author puts forward a set of assumptions and possible context for examining the connection between the concepts of enlightenment and taste. Kant’s definition of enlightenment is accepted, with special emphasis on the sphere of religion. Applying this criterion, we may discern a powerful and influential religious current stemming from strictly speaking Church circles that denies the systematic and historical significance of the opus of Dositej Obradovic, who in his time was a protagonist of the European enlightenment. Such a revaluation has been accepted by the greater portion of the younger generation, which relies predominantly on the St. Sava Myth. With a change of worldview, undoubtedly, tastes change as well. The next section of the paper discusses the approach to taste of the Scottish philosopher David Hume representative of dispositional aesthetic. Finally it is argued that music as one of the arts, might be exemplary for appraising the condition of enlightenment in a society.

In histories of Serbian painting Sreten Maric is listed among the protagonists of socialist realism, and that on the basis of a single article - his criticism of an exhibition staged by the Association of Visual Artists of Serbia to the benefit of wounded veterans (the exhibition was opened in Belgrade in late 1944, and the article was published in the Christmas 1945 issue of „Politika“). Without denying the historical basis for this judgment, the author of the present paper pleads for a more nuance approach and propounds the thesis that socialist realism was primarily a complex pattern of social relations, and only in the second place a substantively defined doctrine. On the basis of an insight into the relevant sources it is argued that Maric was not a theorist of socialist realism; on the other hand, an ideologue of social painting he was indeed, believing in a synthesis of Art and Revolution. By way of comparison, the figures of Miroslav Krleža and Georg Lukacs are referred to: neither of the two was a protagonist of socialist realism, though both belonged firmly to the so-called leftist thought.

The text presents the basic theses involved in elaborating the topic of political Thought of French Existentialists in the Works of Yugoslav Praxis-Philosophers. One representative example is briefly analyzed.