Much has changed since Gerson Sher traveled to Yugoslavia to research his dissertation amid the political and intellectual ferment of the late 1960s. For one thing, the idiosyncratic country that captured his imagination no longer exists. Nor does Praxis, the group of Marxist humanist philosophers Sher studied. But this is not the only reason he responds warily to a request for an interview: “I am appalled,” he says, “that you should be interested in Praxis at this time.”

Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, “the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism.” Sher’s dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group’s yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term “Praxis” and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously anti-humanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic.

History, the Praxists urged, “is made neither by objective forces nor dialectical laws; it is made instead by people, who act to transform their world within the limits of historical possibilities.” So wrote Sher in 1977. In the precarious decade to follow, the Praxis philosophers would indeed transform their world. But the way they did so was not, at that time, imaginable to academics in the West. Who could have known that one of the Praxis philosophers would later become vice president of Milosevic’s party — and its chief ideologue during the Bosnian war? Or that another member, once a passionate critic of nationalism, would sign a 1996 petition calling for the Hague to drop war-crimes charges against the brutal Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whom the petition dubbed “the true leader of all Serbs”?