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 We argue that this issue is an important historical document in the changing social atmosphere of the former Yugoslavia, with the first signs of its disintegration.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.