Walking a Fine Line: The Skopje University in the Early Post-War Period (1945–1950s)

The end of the Second World War and the establishment of the Second Yugoslavia paved the way for the formation of a Macedonian state—for the first time in history. The immediate post-war national institution-building including the scientific, educational, and publishing politics in Macedonia created a peculiar context where academic workers were expected to navigate a fine line between the national and class criteria in research and teaching. In this chapter, I focus on the early post-war Skopje University to discuss the epistemological ruptures and continuities between the pre- and post-war habits of observation, methodologies, and social research themes. Despite the official prohibition of sociology in its pre-war form, this period is extremely instructive for the framework of the early post-war articulation of social phenomena in Macedonia and, especially, the context for institutionalizing sociology in Macedonia in the 1960s.