Parallel Polis

Parallel Polis is a socio-political concept created by Czech political thinker and dissident Vaclav Benda, in connection with the informal civic initiative Charter 77. Benda, alongside other philosophers, sought to build a theoretical framework of the social events in the circles of dissidents.

The so-called alternative culture or underground was described in the text Parallel Polis in 1978 for the first time. As a political scientist, Benda noticed the emergence of a new social structure in artistic and intellectual circles as a tool to escape the totalitarian communist regime. He detected the following basic pillars of this new "field":

These patterns of the parallel structure are not a closed set. On the contrary, they occur more on all fronts of the resistance against the authoritarian State. The aim of the Parallel Polis, according to Vaclav Havel, Ivan Martin Jirous, Milan Šimečky and other dissents, who discussed the concept, should be a so-called independent society. A society that is not oppressed by laws and the decisions of the representatives of the public authorities. A society that is based on its own values. Values which are not forced upon by the central authorities. You could even say, that "Parallel Polis" today does not represent a "dissident world" but the world of persuasions and private interests of the society as a whole. On one hand, "Parallel Polis" gives to the totalitarian authorities what it wants, but at the same time does everything it wants and has nothing in common with the authorities.

The concept of Parallel Polis is increasingly relevant because of the increased activities in the field of civil rights & the way the authoritarian state has been suppressed. There was great attention paid to Benda's ideas not only in the Czechoslovak dissident community but also in Western political circles. It was, however, never put into practice. With the arrival of the Velvet Revolution in 1990, the idea seemed irrelevant.

It has since been revived by a group of scholars who originally met at the University of Washington but who now work at other academic institutions. Their thinking posits that Benda's idea is now being practiced on the Internet which facilitates parallel institutions. Since 2014, a physical space inspired by the idea and named after it exists in Prague's Holešovice district.

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Wikipedia