In the 1960s, Boris Ziherl provided Slovenian sociology with its theoretical and institutional foundation – historical materialism and a university department. After Ziherl, however, the two have only grown apart, often precisely through institutional ignorance of Ziherl’s legacy. And it is by assuming an anti-institutional perspective that two recent studies affirmatively articulate this legacy onto historical materialism. Both texts intervene into the Slovenian sociology of literature, which was also largely founded by Ziherl. I will hence address the key field shared by Slovenian sociology and literary studies: Prešeren studies. Ziherl’s account of the Slovenian national poet France Prešeren was formed during WWII and in the postwar period. While Ziherl’s interwar Prešeren is a poet and as such an adversary of German Romanticism, his postwar Prešeren is a thinker and as such an ally of Hegel’s anti-Romantic thought. In both cases, I will view it against the backdrop of the above-mentioned reactualisations of Ziherl: Miklavž Komelj’s book on Partisan art, for the first period, and Rastko Močnik’s book on Prešeren studies, for the second
