^aFaculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Lepuieva 6, Zagreb 10000, Croatia. E-mail: mkasapovic@fpzg.hr

Abstract

The institutional development of political science in Croatia began in 1962 with the establishment of the Faculty of Political Sciences as the first academic institution of its kind in the then communist Central and Eastern Europe. Until the 1990s, this development was underpinned by two major factors. The first was the feud between the partisans and the opponents of political science as an independent discipline, which resulted in a compromise: the faculty was instituted as an organisation for the interdisciplinary study of economics, sociology, philosophy, history and political science. The second factor was the dominance of Marxist political science whose goal was to turn itself into an 'anti-bourgeois', that is, anti-Western political science, even into a sort of an anti-political science.