JOSIP ZUPANOV'S EGALITARIAN SYNDROME: A REAPPRAISAL

Josip Zupanov's thesis about the egalitarian syndrome as an obstacle to development is very influential across the social sciences in Croatia. This paper analyses the theoretical and empirical basis of Zupanov's work on radical egalitarianism from the late 1960s. He developed the theory in three key publications "The producer and risk" (1967), "Economic aspirations and the social norm of egalitarianism", which he published with Darinka Tadic (1969), and finally "Egalitarianism and industrialism" (1969), repeating it in his later work. The analysis reveals important weaknesses in the empirical foundations and theoretical inferences of Zupanov's thesis of radical egalitarianism. Secondly, contextualising his work into the late 1960s re-examines the widely held view about his work as critical of the regime, showing that his theses about the homo oeconomicus were part of a liberal reform wing that openly advocated market solutions at the time of his writing. Thirdly, his work is related to the concept of "deviant" modernization in Yugoslavia, which assumes that all societies converge to a capitalist model of development. This approach is criticised from the perspective of multiple modernities, according to which modernization is not a linear trajectory towards a hegemonic model, but an open ended process that necessarily takes shape in context-specific constellations.