Sociology in Poland

To Be Continued?

Marta Bucholc

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137581860
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137581877
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking book provides a compelling account of the social sciences in post-war Central and Eastern Europe. The first English-language monograph to analyse the history of sociology in Poland up to the present day, it maps transformations in the discipline against political and social change. Related in an accessible and engaging manner, it offers a comprehensive examination of sociology as a part of Polish society and culture after 1945. It can also be used as an introduction to the subject and a guide to further reading. Part of the influential Sociology Transformed series, Sociology in Poland will interest social and political scientists, historians and policymakers.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Marta BucholcSociology in PolandSociology Transformed10.1057/978-1-137-58187-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marta Bucholc^{1, 2}

(1)

Kate Hamburger Kolleg, Recht als Kultur, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

(2)

Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract

The introduction discusses the history of sociology in Poland up to 1945. It includes an overview of the country’s situation in the nineteenth century and the difficulties which the institutionalization of sociology encountered in a European society deprived of a national state framework for over a hundred years. The focus is on the decisive period between 1918 and 1939, when the first sociological institutes were established and basic directions in research and theory were set. The author argues that this newborn Polish sociology was marked by strong public commitment. It was striving for universal consequentiality, but frequently failed to achieve this as a result of pauperization and parochialism. The tension between local engagement and international academic excellence is claimed to reemerge at each subsequent stage of the development of sociology in Poland, notwithstanding the political conditions.

Keywords

SociologyInstitutionalizationPolandHistoryEngagement

End Abstract

A proper history of the transformations of sociology in Poland would require a very substantial introduction. Local idiosyncrasies pose a grave challenge to attempts at any kind of clear delimitations, whether conceptual, geographical or chronological. If we follow Jerzy Szacki (1995a) in taking the mid-nineteenth century as the beginning, there might have been sociology ever since; but there was either no Poland or an ontologically unstable one. The instability was both real and symbolic: frontiers moving, populations shifting, and institutions falling apart and emerging unpredictably. If we narrow the research field down to the twentieth century, three time-thresholds may organize our thinking: Poland’s regaining independence in 1918; the German and Soviet occupation during World War II, with the subsequent communist takeover; and the fall of communism in 1989. These dates are not only milestones for Polish society, but also for sociology in Poland, which was born before the first threshold, suffered terribly as a result of the second, then took decades to recover and re-institutionalize just to face an avalanche of new challenges after the third. Consecutive shocks marked subsequent periods in its development and institutionalization, but to say where exactly it all happened would inevitably refer us to Alfred Jarry’s famous dictum of 1988: “Set in Poland, that is to say nowhere.”

Order and Method

To avoid definitional misunderstandings, in this book on sociology in Poland I focus on the period after 1945, when, at least geographically, the country became a stable entity. For operationalizing sociology, an equally rudimentary but more liberal criterion will be applied. This book will feature people who believed themselves to be, or were believed by others to be, sociologists by education, work or interests. It will also feature the institutions with which such people were affiliated. Common opinion will be used to decide whether an institution, a person or an event was a part of the transformation of sociology in Poland, as is the case with all social phenomena in a historical narrative, in which very precise demarcations might prove more harmful than otherwise (Sułek 2011, p. 202). I will try to keep a balance between telling a story about people on the one hand and about institutions and institutionalized practices on the other. Of course, it is more tempting, even though more difficult and at times awkward, to write about people. It is also useful not to lose sight of the intersections of sociology and biographies of sociologists (Keen and Mucha 2006, p. 5). Some of the people I write about have become dim paper-cut figures to my generation; some I still remember vaguely; and others were my teachers or my colleagues, with whom we will, hopefully, continue to work together for decades to come. Nevertheless, these are sociological institutions and practices, that stand at the center of this book, and I will strive to see institutions through people. My attention will inevitably in the first place go to academic sociology, but according to my liberal principles I will also include various other spheres in which sociology in Poland has developed.

Further methodological explanations will be given as I go along, though I do not claim to use any one consistent method throughout the book; the reality which I am describing was wildly inconsistent. My readers may find that more detail and more hard data would sometimes be desirable, especially students of history of sociology in other countries, who are looking for comparisons and generalizations. I could not agree with them more. It is a great art to include much knowledge in a short text, while at the same time not boring the reader with too much inconsequential information. Few authors possess this excellent quality. Two of them, who dedicated many of their works to the fate of Polish sociology, were my guides in writing this book: Janusz Mucha and Antoni Sułek. However, I am aware that my own writing temperament drives me more towards interpretation than fact, which I decided not to fight. I will present an account of Polish sociology by way of a very personal tale, though with due diligence to preserve fairness and to refrain from free-floating conjectures and rash judgments. For more details, I will refer to the Bibliography. Those who are versed in scholarship on Polish sociology will find that my interpretations diverge in many aspects from those presented by more deserving authors in the field. I may only say that I believe a disagreement about interpretations is a healthy thing for science. It is useless to mask unavoidable subjectivity by lengthy methodological excursions.One preliminary issue, however, must be clarified. The outbreak of World War II will be a starting point, but at the same time it will be a missing one. This introduction takes us to the tragic year 1939; but there will then be a break before Chap. 2 takes up the tale in 1945. By this token, I leave unaddressed a short heroic story of Polish science and, in particular, Polish sociology, which occurred under the Nazi and Soviet occupation.

There are as many good reasons to include the period between 1939 and 1945 in this book as there are to leave it out. Undoubtedly, wartime brought about the greatest single package of social changes in Polish history; but it can hardly be deemed a period of transformation. It was a social cataclysm on an unprecedented scale. During the war all sociological institutions—universities, scientific societies and associations, publishing houses and journals—ceased to operate or went underground. Admittedly, it was the biggest and most efficient underground in Europe, and many sociologists proved their courage. Still, it was an underground science that was merely persisting, waiting for the nightmare to cease. Science withdrew entirely into the private and the clandestine, its focus was self-preservation, not development. The period was traumatic, not transformative.

The war did affect sociology in many ways, but what mattered more was the post-war balance, which I will deal with at the beginning of Chap. 2. In this book, I am interested in transformations as processes which do not overturn the whole structure and cancel out all patterns of social practices. Transformations, while leading to new figurations of people, practices and institutions, maintain a certain level of continuity with former states. From this perspective, the war and its aftermath represent a radical break. Continuity was partly restored after 1956 by symbolic means, such as the numbering of Polish Sociological Congresses (see Chap. 3 and the Appendix; also Szacki 1995b, pp. 109ff).

I then turn directly to post-war transformations of Polish sociology. The best course of action in reporting them to foreigners would undoubtedly be to proceed decade by decade. To divide the post-war history of Poland into rough “decades” is a commonplace narrative technique. Its mathematical elegance and mnemotechnical advantages seem to impose themselves on the events, many of which indeed happened in approximately ten-year intervals, largely reflecting the usage of the Communist governments, which tended to arrange its agendas into neat five-year units.

In this book, the history of Polish sociology will be divided into four phases, covered by four respective chapters: 1945–1955 (“Survivors and Supervisors”), 1957–1968 (“Small Stabilization and Cleansing”), 1969–1989 (“Great Expectations”), 1990–2015 (“Catching Up With Reality”). This is a much less detailed timeline than the one usually applied by chroniclers of Polish sociology (e.g., Bielecka-Prus 2009; Mucha 2003; Kraśko 1996), and it will inevitably lead to a further loss of detail. On the other hand, it has one methodological advantage: it is relatively independent of political developments. I do not deny the influence of politics upon science in any political system, whether socialism, communism or democracy.¹ However, this does not mean that a narrative of the transformations of sociology need reflect this influence by adopting a structure aligned with the subtleties of political history.

In particular, the deep and varied impact of the communist system on academic science in Poland frequently and unduly overshadowed the internal processes in the course of which sociology was produced and reproduced. Even though one might dispute Szacki’s proposition that Polish sociology may be deemed a “normal science” in the Kuhnian sense as early as in the 1920s, a period of normalization did arrive (Szacki 1995b, pp. 78ff). At least from 1956 it is possible to trace continuous internal sociological developments in research, theory and organizational life as well as downwards political conditioning. Therefore, I draw a clear though controversial division between sociology and the outside world, between intellectual dynamics within sociological communities and their interplay with their environment, politics included. There is one additional advantage to this approach: it presents the history of post-war sociology as one turbulent process, and not as two processes before and after 1989, when politics starts (almost) afresh. I do not believe that such a break ever happened. Even after the war—though sociology would sometimes disappear from universities for a few years—the development of sociological thinking and research went on constantly, each phase rooted in the previous ones. Sociology in Poland never ceased to exist.

I fully appreciate the difficulties of following a narrative which is not only diverts from the well-known events of political history, but also, from time to time, from chronology as such. To make it easier to grasp the historical backdrop of things, I append a brief calendar to this book. It lists the most relevant events from 1945 onwards and outlines the most significant institutional development of sociology in Poland. There, my readers may find a more general historical framework, both for Polish society and sociology in Poland.

In the Beginning there Was No Poland

Before we launch on our journey starting in 1945, a small look at the prehistory and early history of sociology in Poland seems necessary. It is prerequisite to know about the beginning of its vicissitudes in order to understand their outcomes. My purpose is, first, to offer an account of the early history of a Central European sociology that formed in a relatively large, newly independent country, both multiethnic and multicultural, with a burden of path-dependence as far as institutional coherence, social solidarity, political and economic governance and stability were concerned. It is a general panorama of problems, with many subtleties falling out, which I decided to leave aside, not because I find them unimportant or uninteresting, but because I only include here the information that I find absolutely indispensable for the subsequent chapters.

For over a hundred years from the end of the eighteenth century Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia. Former Polish territories forming a part of each of these three countries were experiencing all the processes that forged the region’s fate, though their populations were deprived of any agency apart from the recurrent and invariably failed uprisings, and a few more or less autonomous forms of political organization sponsored by foreign powers. The regional political map was further complicated by linguistic, religious and cultural factors. Another aspect was the anti-Polish cultural policies launched at times by all partitioning powers, albeit with different intensity. A long life, under what was for many an age-long foreign occupation, created a sort of double intellectual conscience. The main social bearer of moral dilemmas was the intelligentsia (which was prevalently both ethnically and culturally Polish). Its class voice dominated the expression of national aspirations and ambitions, despite its relative scarcity in a mostly rural population.

In the nineteenth century, a distinct and unique intellectual landscape emerged in Central and Eastern Europe, which is best described as a series of contradictions: national versus cosmopolitan, loyalist versus revolutionary, localized versus universalist. These dichotomies were not unheard of in the West. However, as a result of rampant imperialism and militarism combined with very unevenly distributed spurts of industrialization, the great questions of the epoch took on a somewhat deflected form in the Polish territories. There was no nationality to match the national sentiments, loyalism was hued by pragmatism and opportunism, and revolutionary ideals sometimes took on bizarre forms due to the lack of political guidance and practice. The dilemmas to which Leo Tolstoy chose to give to Konstantin Levin, the sense of exceptionalism and historical incompatibility with the rest of the European continent, were very much alive a few thousands kilometers west of Moscow.

Levin worked on a book on agricultural organization in Russia. He worked at home, not because he could not have become an academic, but because he did not wish to, and it was not in any way necessary. The nineteenth century was the last glorious age of private science. It survived longer wherever institutional involvement was not attractive to outstanding intellectuals. Sociology in Poland was born as a private science, with its original concepts sprouting from independent readings of the German, French and British pioneers of the discipline (Szacki 1995b). The peasant classes and their backwardness, alongside problems of national consciousness and national organization, were prevailing motifs in this diversified and non-paradigmatic sociology (Mucha and Krzyżowski 2014, p. 408).

The fertility of private scholars was limited to privately founded and financed scientific groups and associations, their readership to their immediate social circles. Universities did not act as broadcasters here. There was no Polish state. Consequently, no Polish academic institutions equivalent to Western state universities existed in the first formative period of sociology in Poland. University teaching in Polish was only possible in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. 1945–1955: Survivors and Supervisors
• 3. 1956–1968: Modest Stabilization and Cleansing
• 4. 1969–1989: Great Expectations
• 5. 1990–2015: Catching Up with Reality
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter