These reflections have taken shape over some twenty years. Their first impulse came from a visit I made to my native country in 1967, after an absence of nearly thirty years. The old friends I met, their fears and their hopes, induced me to turn again to speculations that I thought I had put behind me. In particular, Leah Patáaková, the daughter of one of these friends, succeeded in persuading me that the embers of Masaryk's Czechoslovakia were not altogether dead, that a spark here and there might yet be rekindled. To make sure that I would keep this in mind, Leah supplied me for the next two years with issues of Literámí Listy, one of the liveliest forums of the public debate that has come to be known as the Prague Spring. In 1969 an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship provided an opportunity to familiarize myself with the content and background of this debate. In the course of subsequently writing the occasional piece about the Prague Spring, I discussed some salient themes with Richard Vernon, a newly acquired colleague at the University of Western Ontario. Rather intriguingly, he suggested that these themes invite comparison with ideas of socialist pluralism originating in England half a century earlier. Out of these suggestions grew a number of joint efforts, evidence of which found its way into this study. Sections I in Chapter 3 and II in Chapter 5, in particular, owe much to Professor Vernon's collaboration, and the Introduction benefited appreciably from his own writings and from the helpful comments he made on mine.