Background
Markovic, Mihailo was born in 1923 in Belgrade.
Marxist social theorist Serbian political figure
Markovic, Mihailo was born in 1923 in Belgrade.
University of Belgrade and University of London.
Taught Philosophy at the University of Belgrade from 1956 until 1975, when he was removed from his teaching position for political reasons. 1983, named Chair of the Committee for Philosophy and Social Theory of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. Active in Yugoslav politics in the early 1990s.
During the 1950s, Markovic’s philosophical activity was concentrated mainly on logic and the philosophy of language. This work culminated in 1961 in his major monograph Dialectical Theory of Meaning, one of the earliest attempts by a Marxist philosopher to deal in depth with the subject of meaning. Markovic rejects positivist, behaviorist and existentialist theories of meaning in favour of one based on the Marxian concept of praxis. ‘The meaning of a sign’, he wrote, ‘is the practice by which it is created and which its use serves’. Thereafter he turned to social and political philosophy and employed the concept of praxis in elaborating a theory of democratic socialism based on humanistic principles derived from the writings of Marx. In this activity he was part of a group of like-minded philosophers from Belgrade and Zagreb who gathered around the influential journal Praxis, published from 1964 until suppressed by the government in 1975. In that year Markovic and seven of his colleagues in the Philosophy Department at the University of Belgrade were suspended indefinitely from their teaching positions because of their critical stance towards what they viewed as authoritarian and bureaucratic deformations of socialism in Yugoslavia. Markovic’s arguments for democratic socialism. elaborated principally in From Affluence to Praxis (1974) and Democratic Socialism: Theory and Practice (1982), are premised on the conviction that only in such a system can people live a life of praxis in the sense of realizing their best human capacities through independent and creative, but at the same time socially oriented, action. In Markovic’s view this would be a society of‘radical humanization’, free of alienated labour, in which human beings are no longer treated as things. Its institutional features would include social own" ership of the means of production, worker sellmanagement and flexible central planning by democratically elected representative bodies. Markovic’s active support of the policies of the Slobodan Milosevic government in the early 1990s drew fire from critics who regarded it as inconsistent with his expressed humanistic and democratic ideals.