PALACKÝ AND CZECH POLITICS AFTER 1876
and, to a lesser extent, minor posts in the imperial bureaucracy. Circumstances and institutions have changed with time, but the principle so well illustrated by Palacký endures. For example, Czechs and Slovaks made a great success of parliamentary democracy during the twenty years’ truce, upholding those principles and institutions so dear to the British, French, and Americans who had supported Czechs and Slovaks in achieving national independence. Since 1948, Czechs and Slovaks have tried to advance their interests within the ideological and institutional constraints of a people’s republic. In a number of respects, the relationship of Palacký and the Old Czechs to Austria-Hungary is thus analogous to that of the KSČ leadership to the Soviet Union.23
(4) Palacký helped give Czech politics of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century its characteristically patriotic and liberal foundations and encouraged, through his scholarly as well as polemical writings, a politics more often popular (lidová) than democratic (demokratická), at least in the sense of advocating policies designed to uplift and improve the lot of the common people while not allowing much popular participation in making and executing those policies.
(5) Palacký was among the first Czech politicians to take a courageous stand on principle at a decisive moment, as he did in 1848, in 1867, and 1871. He has not been the last to do so, as indicated by the actions of his fellow countrymen in the struggle for national independence after 1914, in opposing Nazism after 1939, and most recently in trying to establish “socialism with a human face.” One cannot argue, much less prove, that every Czech taking courageous action against heavy odds was inspired by Palacký. One can simply contend that Palacký by courage as well as by intellectual leadership and prudent conduct helped set the style for subsequent Czech and Slovak politics.
(6) Finally, Palacký’s influence as a prophet and intellectual leader endures primarily to the extent that he demonstrated to the Czechs that to conduct politics without ideals or a sense of history is to court disaster. Guidance of this sort would be especially necessary in Czech polítics, given the great discrepancies, past and present, between aims and achievements, between theory and practice, and between ideals and reality. One simply cannot make much sense of Czech politics in any generation—apparently a series of many compromises and defeats—without taking account of Czech tenacity of purpose and national identiy. This may, in part, explain why Palacký excercised greater posthumous influence in politics through his articulation of Czech political ideals than through any practical political programs that he endorsed or implemented. This is what
