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Andrej Gosar (30 November 1887 – 21 April 1970) was aSlovenian andYugoslavpolitician,sociologist,economist andpolitical theorist.
Gosar was born in a working-class family inLogatec,Inner Carniola, in what was then theAustro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a shoemaker, and Andrej worked in his workshop two years, before enrolling to theClassical Gymnasium inLjubljana in 1902. Between 1910 and 1918, he studied law at theUniversity of Vienna, where he obtained his PhD.
In 1918, after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation ofYugoslavia, he became a legal advisor to the temporary Provincial Government for Slovenia in matters of welfare and social policy. In this period, he joined the conservative-CatholicSlovene People's Party. In 1920, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of theKingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In the early 1920s, he became an activetrade unionist, serving as a legal expert in the Yugoslav Professional Union, the largestChristian Socialist trade union in Slovenia. In 1922, he was the co-founder of the Alliance of the Working People, a wideleft wing platform that unified several political parties, from Christian Socialist groups toCommunists, for the local elections. The platform gained significant support, and won the elections inLjubljana, establishing a wide range welfare network. In 1925, he was re-elected to the National Assembly. Between 1927 and 1928, he served as Minister of Welfare in the coalition governments ofVelimir Vukićević andAnton Korošec. In 1929, he was appointed to the State Legislative Council, an institution established during the royal dictatorship ofAlexander I of Yugoslavia as a substitute for an elected parliament. He resigned in 1931, when the Slovene People's Party withdrew its support to the royal regime.
In 1929, he became professor of sociology and economy at theUniversity of Ljubljana, and between 1935 and 1939, he served as dean of the Faculty for Technology. In the same period, he also became the president of the Yugoslav section of theInternational Paneuropean Union.[1]
During the 1920s and 1930s, he published numerous treatises on economic and social policies. The most important of these wereEssays on National Economy (1922),For A Christian Socialism (1923),Social Economy (1924). In his magnum opus, the treatiseFor A New Social Order, published in two volumes between 1933 and 1935, he defended amarket economy with welfare regulations, and urged for a politics of "Christian Social activism". In the early 1920s, he was considered one of the leading theoreticians of the Christian Socialist wing of the Slovene People's Party. By the early 1930s, his theories came under attack from all sides: from the right, he was challenged by the corporativist Catholics aroundErnest Tomec,Lambert Ehrlich andJosip Jeraj. From the left, he was seen with suspicion by exponents of the radical Christian Socialist youth, such asTone Fajfar,Aleš Stanovnik andEdvard Kocbek. He was also criticized byclassical liberal economists and byMarxist theoreticians, includingEdvard Kardelj, the foremost theoretician of theCommunist Party of Slovenia.
With the rise of Catholic integralism andcorporatism in the late 1930s, Gosar's position in Slovene political Catholicism became marginal. In the last years before theSecond World War, Gosar moved to a morecentrist position, calling for aChristian Democratic re-alignment of the Slovene People's Party. He warned against authoritarian corporatism, fascism, and Marxism, calling for an "autonomist Christian solidarism", based on communitarian values. He was also one of the most consistent advocates of the autonomy of Slovenia within Yugoslavia. In 1940, he published a volume exploring the legal, economic, financial, political and social arguments for the creation of a "Banovina of Slovenia", based on the model of the autonomousBanovina of Croatia.[2]
After the Axisinvasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he refused to join theLiberation Front of the Slovenian People, because of its pro-Communist orientation. By late 1941, he broke with the underground leadership of the Slovene People's Party due to disagreements on the issue of the relations towards the Italian occupation regime; contrary to the party's main current, which supported some sort of tacit tactical agreement, Gosar disapproved of all kinds of collaboration with the occupation forces. Rejecting both thepartisan movement and the collaborationistSlovene Home Guard, he became one of the leaders of the so-called "Catholic Centre", together withJakob Šolar in theProvince of Ljubljana, andEngelbert Besednjak andVirgil Šček in theJulian March. In 1944, he was arrested by theNazi German authorities and sent to theDachau concentration camp.
After the return in 1945, he was stripped of most of his pre-war academic functions by the new Communist regime; he was however allowed to continue teaching forest legislation at the Technical Faculty. After retirement in 1958, he published a personal memoir, in which he bitterly described his position in the decade 1935-1945 as "the voice shouting in the desert".
In 1967, he was awarded with thePro Ecclesia et Pontifice by theHoly See.
He died in Ljubljana in 1970.
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