This book has explored discourses on critical thinking through practices that Slovaks and Westerners expected critical thinking to inhabit in Slovak society after the collapse of Communist rule. These interlocutors pointed to ways in which they saw criticism being practiced in the public sphere and the nation's classrooms and found it deficient for the post-Communist, democratic, or capitalist order that they wished to emerge. I have used this commentary as the basis for exploring how veritably we could speak of a whole society as exhibiting or lacking critical thought. I have sought to situate the laments that I heard of deficient civic criticism within Slovakia's history of liberal and revolutionary leftist politics, as well as the context of postsocialist modernity.