Modern Tendencies in European Historiography and Their Parallels and Reflections in the Works by the Czech Historian František Kutnar

The core of the project is to analyze the scholarly work by František Kutnar, one of the most significant personalities of modern Czech historical sciences, and to pinpoint its place in the context of European historiography. Within the framework of Czech historiography, Kutnar is perceived as an authority capable of original scholarly reasoning, capable of sourcing out from the plural and culturally varied atmosphere in the interwar scholarship, and a person influenced not only by the already detected structural inspirations. The project considers Kutnar's approach to historical reality and to historical scholarship, including its methodology and theory, as totally innovative, enriching the existing empiric-critical character of historiography, preferring chiefly causal-generic interpretative patterns. Thus, his work reflects stimuli from period sociology, philosophy, and linguistics and is parallel to French, German, and Polish historiography as it is seen in an original interpretation of social, economic, or in the broadest sense also cultural history, applied by Kutnar even in the era of Marxist historiography.