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The tenth anniversary of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe is the basis for this text which reflects upon the past ten years and what lies ahead for the future. An international group of academics and public intellectuals, including former dissidents and active politicians, engage in an exchange on the antecedents, causes, contexts, meanings and legacies of the 1989 revolutions. The contributors address various issues including liberal democracy and its enemies; modernity and discontent; economic reforms and their social impact; ethnicity; nationalism and religion; geopolitics; electoral systems and political power; European integration; and the demise of Yugoslavia

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION. School Building -- PART ONE Blurred Genres: Reflections on Disciplinary Practices -- CHAPTER 1 Political Theory after the Enlightenment Project -- CHAPTER 2 Twenty-five Years of Social Science and Social Change -- CHAPTER 3 Economic History as a Cure for Economics -- CHAPTER 4 Can the "Other" of Philosophy Speak? -- CHAPTER 5 Reflections on Interdisciplinarity -- PART TWO The State of the Art: New Methods and New Questions -- CHAPTER 6 After History? -- CHAPTER 7 The Global Situation -- CHAPTER 8 Modernity and Identity -- CHAPTER 9 The Role of Norms and Law in Economics: An Essay on Political Economy -- CHAPTER 10 Material Culture, Theoretical Culture, and Delocalization -- CHAPTER 11 Science as Alchemy -- PART THREE Thick Description: Field Overviews and Institutional History -- CHAPTER 12 Whatever Happened to the "Social" in Social History? -- CHAPTER 13 Postcolonialism and Its Discontents: History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial Critique -- CHAPTER 14 Structure, Contingency, and Choice: A Comparison of Trends and Tendencies in Political Science -- CHAPTER 15 Interdisciplinarity at New York University -- PART FOUR The World in Pieces: Political Philosophy and World Governance -- CHAPTER 16 Political Theory and Moral Responsibility -- CHAPTER 17 A "Moral Core" Solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma -- CHAPTER 18 Reinterpreting Risk -- CHAPTER 19 Retrotopia: Critical Reason Turns Primitive -- CHAPTER 20 International Society: What Is the Best that We Can Do? -- AUTHOR NOTES

This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. The authors come from the different but intersecting worlds of academia, politics and business. The editors have chosen the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage the contributors to adopt a dialogue-oriented approach and in reference to the example of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake 400 years ago for holding heretic views which were probably far more backward than the views of those condemning him. The idea behind this approach was that any complex social process or political attempt to change the lives of people will have unintended consequences, usually paradoxical ones. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory. The volume also contains a short biography of George Soros and a list of his published works and philanthropic initiatives