Dragoljub Živković (Serbian philosopher)
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Dragoljub S. Živković (Serbian Cyrillic: Драгољуб С. Живковић; born 1937) is a Serbian philosopher and former politician. He has served in the Serbian parliament and the Vojvodina provincial assembly. Živković was at different times a member of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) and the Christian Democratic Party of Serbia (DHSS).
Živković was born in Radijevići in the municipality of Nova Varoš, in what was then the Zeta Banovina of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He finished high school in Sarajevo and later attended the University of Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences, ultimately earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy.[1] He became a full professor at the University of Priština in Kosovo, and in 1983 authored a work entitled Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Life and Works.[2] He has published widely in his field.
Initially, Živković's perspective was broadly consistent with the governing ideology of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In a 1981 gathering organized by the Marxist Centre of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) and the National Library of Serbia, he said that all workers were objectively Marxists and that philosophy was nothing other than “the self-conscious awakening of the revolutionary masses."[3]
The political climate of Kosovo became increasingly fraught in the late 1980s, with divisions rising between the province's Serb and Albanian communities. Živković criticized the effects of this division on academic life at the University of Priština, saying in 1988 that both politics and academia in the province were trending toward counter-revolution.[4] In February 1990, he lamented that two parallel academic streams had emerged, respectively in Serbo-Croatian and Albanian. He said that the university had ceased to focus on teaching and the scientific process but was instead offering "basic training for terrorism" and "turning Kosovo into Lebanon" (referring to the profound ethnic divisions in that country) and called for Socialist Republic of Serbia's Law on Universities to be applied to the institution.[5] Inter-communal relations continued to worsen after this time, and for most of the 1990s Kosovo Albanians generally boycotted Serbian state institutions and participated in parallel structures.
Serbia transitioned from a one-party socialist state to a (nominally) multi-party democracy in 1990, and Živković appears to have turned away from socialist ideology at around the same time. In an October 1990 speech at a meeting of the New Democracy (ND) party, he blamed the situation in Kosovo on a number of factors, including "the attitude towards work, the fetishization of belonging to the Albanian nation, political Bolshevism," and compulsory university education. He called for the complete integration of Kosovo into Serbia's economic and legal system, while also criticizing recent moves toward "a police state that creates only apparent peace."[6] He later wrote, "let the state use its instruments to protect its interests, and not push every Serb and every Albanian to control each other, to govern each other."[7]
In the aftermath of the 1998–99 Kosovo War, the Philosophy department of the (Serb) University of Priština was temporarily relocated to Blace in Central Serbia. In this period, Živković was one of a number of professors who criticized the Serbian government for its "military-partisan" oversight of the university.[8] He subsequently moved to Pančevo in the province of Vojvodina. In January 2002, he was chosen as president of the Writers' Association of Pančevo.[9]