Krzysztof Brzechczyn

This paper is a review of two books devoted to the historical policy of Putin’s Russia authored by Jade McGlynn (Memory Makers. The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia) and Andrzej Nowak (Powrót “Imperium Zła”. Ideologie współczesnej Rosji, ich twórcy i krytycy (1913–2023) [The return of the “Empire of Evil”. The ideologies of contemporary Russia, their creators and critics (1913–2023)]) The review focuses on the question of the use of history in Russian politics and the differences between the historical policies of democratic and authoritarian states.

This article aims to conceptualize the political compromise made at the Round Table in 1989 Poland, in light of the theory of power in non-Marxian historical materialism. Although, the above-mentioned theory was successfully applied to the evolution of the communist system in Poland, it does not serve well as an explanation of this part of Polish history. There are two reasons for this state of affairs. First, the above-mentioned theory of power is a materialistic one. It means that all fundamental social changes are explained by the activity of ordinary citizens and rank and file members of the ruling class. Whereas, the authors of the Round Table agreement belonged to the elite of both classes. Second, non-Marxian historical materialism is a conflict theory which means that all fundamental social changes are introduced by mass revolutions and protests. Whereas, the political changes leading to the decline of communism were initiated by class compromises made in conditions of relative social peace. I will expand this theory in order to capture mechanisms of social compromise. Namely, I build the model of class balance which led to a choice in the adequate strategies by leaders of both classes (rulers and citizens). Finally, the political development of Poland during the years 1988–1991 will be analyzed in the light of the presented model of class compromise.

The purpose of this study is to review "Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe," edited by Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth, and James Mark and "Antropologia donosu" [Anthropology of Denunciation] edited by Jarosław Syrnyk and Rober Klementowski. The review focuses on the political circumstances of the founding of institutes of memory in Eastern Europe, their differing research approaches and dealing with the communist past. In its second part, different patterns of collaboration and forms of refusal are analyzed.

The chapter presents the main achievements of the Pozna School of Methodology against the background of the postwar history of Polish philosophy. In its first part, the history of Polish philosophy in the twentieth century is outlined. In the second part, the institutional history of the Pozna School is sketched, and its main sources of inspiration and determinants of the School's research program are identified. In the third part the main scientific achievements of Jerzy Kmita, Leszek Nowak and Jerzy Topolski-three major advocates of the School-are presented.

This introductory article outlines the intellectual agenda of the special issue “Current Trends in the Analytical Philosophy of History.” It identifies a marked shift in the field: from the traditional focus on formal, ontological, and epistemological foundations of historical knowledge toward broader engagement with the practical, social, and political functions of historiography. The contributions gathered in this issue reflect this trend, employing the tools of modal logic, conceptual analysis, formal semantics, and causal modeling to address topics such as the standardizability of historical narratives, the politicization of historical discourse, and the epistemic architecture of Big History. We argue that a new generation of analytically oriented philosophers of history is not abandoning analytic rigor but repurposing it to interrogate historiography as both a form of knowledge production and social practice. This reorientation signals a practical/pragmatic and social turn in the analytical philosophy of history, grounded in the recognition that historical knowledge must be assessed not only in terms of truth conditions but also with respect to its credibility, usability, and public accountability.

The aim of this article is to analyze Putin’s image of Russian history and Russian–Ukrainian relations. The analysis is mainly based on Jerzy Topolski’s theory of historical narration. Putin’s image of the history of Russia and of Russian–Ukrainian relations involves cycles of integration and disintegration. The image bears the characteristics of a grand narrative, with credibility added by means of such mythologizing methods as glorification, demonization, or actualization. Our guiding questions were: 1. What is the difference between the products of history understood as an academic discipline and the products of historical policy? 2. What is the social function of historical policy? 3. What is the difference between Russian historical policy and the historical policy of other countries?

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Roger Scruton’s views on patriotism and the attitudes of nationalism and oikophobia that endanger proper love of homeland. According to Scruton, patriotism is identical with loyalty to the people who inhabited a certain territory and share common culture, customs and history. The feeling of national loyalty so understood is peaceful by its nature and stabilizes the democratic system. Besides patriotism, Scruton distinguishes two attitudes, of worship of one’s nation and of hostility towards it. The first attitude may transform into nationalism, and then deifies nation and leads to wars and conflicts in history. Unlike the former, the attitude of hostility towards own nation (oikophobia) justifies development of transnational institutions that limited sovereignty of the democratic nation-states and – indirectly – undermine the sovereignty of one’s people. In the final part of the paper I paraphrase the concepts of nation presupposed in the attitudes of patriotism, nationalism and oikophobia, as they are discussed in the theoretical apparatus used by Leszek Nowak in his deformative conception of culture.

The aim of this paper is to paraphrase Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolutions with the use of the conceptual apparatus of non-Marxian historical materialism. In the successive sections of this paper, the concepts of modernization, the nature of state power, an agrarian bureaucracy, and the mechanism of a victorious revolution are paraphrased. This paraphrase makes it possible to distinguish two kinds of agrarian bureaucracies, each resulting in social revolutions with different outcomes. A victorious revolution led to successful modernization in the case of an economic agrarian bureaucracy, but not in the case of a political agrarian bureaucracy.

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization of liberal democracy, the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism.

The authors of this book reconstruct the philosophical, methodological and theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism, a theory of historical process authored by Leszek Nowak (1943-2009), a co-founder of the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the book, philosophical assumptions of this theory are compared with the concepts of Robert Nozick, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank and analytical Marxism. In the second part, non-Marxian historical materialism is compared with the concepts of Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Andrzej Falkiewicz, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, Theda Skocpol and Karl August Wittfogel.

The aim of this book is to explain economic dualism in the history of modern Europe. The emergence of the manorial-serf economy in the Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary in the 16th and the 17th centuries was the result of a cumulative impact of various circumstantial factors. The weakness of cities in Central Europe disturbed the social balance – so characteristic for Western-European societies – between burghers and the nobility. The political dominance of the nobility hampered the development of cities and limited the influence of burghers, paving the way to the rise of serfdom and manorial farms. These processes were accompanied by increased demand for agricultural products in Western Europe.

The purpose of this paper is an interpretation of the social and political thought of the Solidarity movement in the light of the political philosophy of communitarianism. In the first part of the paper, the controversies between liberalism and communitarianism are characterized in order to outline the communitarian response toward the authoritarian/totalitarian challenge. In the second part, the programme of a self-governing republic created by Solidarity is interpreted in the spirit of communitarianism. I reconstruct the ideal vision of human being expressed in of ficial trade union’s documents and essays of Solidarity’s advisers e.g., Stefan Kurowski and Jozef Tischner, and the efforts of the movement for telling the truth about history and its vision of Polish history. Also, I interpret the programme of Self-Governing Republic adopted during the First National Convention of Delegates of Solidarity. In these programmatic documents of Solidarity, one may find ideas characteristic both of the communitarian and liberal political philosophy. However, the liberal ones—including, primarily, the guarantee of human and citizens’ rights, and of individual liberties—were subordinated to the postulate of reconstructing the national and social community. In the course of transformation after 1989, these communitarian elements of Solidarity programme, incompatible with liberal ideological agenda, have been erased.

The aim of this article is to outline the theory of a historical process developed within the framework of the Poznań School of Methodology, mainly by Leszek Nowak and a team of his co-workers. In the first part of the paper, the meta-philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions of Poznań school are reconstructed and juxtaposed with the relevant assumptions of Western analytical Marxism. In the central part of the paper, the main ideas of adaptive reconstruction of historical materialism and non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. In its final part, some problems of reception of Leszek Nowak’s theory of historical process in Polish People’s Republic and the Third Republic are discussed.

The aim of the paper is an extension of the idealizational theory of science in order to explicate intuitions of historians and philosophers of history about unpredictability and contingency of history. The author identifies two types of essential structures: the first kind dominated by the main factor and the second kind which is dominated by a class of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by the main factor, the power of influence it exerts is greater than the sum of the power of influence of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by secondary factors, their total influence is greater than the influence exerted by the main factor, although the power of the latter influence is greater than the power of influence of each secondary factor taken separately. In the latter kind of essential structure the so-called cascade effect can occur which means that at certain moment the power of influence of secondary factors can be greater than influence of main factor. In the further part of this paper, the author examines consequences of cascade effect for construction of scientific theory and historical narrative.

The aim of this paper is to consider the influence of the methodological status of the concept of the totalitarian syndrome on the strategy of its development. It is argued that the totalitarian syndrome as put forward by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski represented a kind of social modelling. However, there are different approaches to modelling in the social sciences. Modelling, when perceived from a neo-Hegelian perspectives, leads to the elaboration of dependencies between social phenomenon and their main factors. Modelling, when seen from a neo-Weberian perspective, relies on the construction of notions which systematize and order social phenomena. This hypothesis is illustrated by a methodological analysis of the extension of the totalitarian syndrome authored by Achim Siegel and Mark R. Thompson.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the beginnings and growth of civil movements in the Baltic republics in years 1985-1991, which led to their state independence. Proces of liberation of Baltic societies will be analyzed according to the following criteria: size and range of the civil movement and forms of its institutionalization (i), political concession made by republican authorities (ii) and level of control over the republican structure of power exercised by the civil movements (iii). Finally, I will try to consider why evolution of the Baltic societies resulted in building of the stable democracies, whereas these same efforts are still unsuccesful in Belarus and were unsuccesful in Ukraine. This analysis will not be a chronicle's presentation of events from current history of the Baltic states but will be based on a coherent theoretical framework achieved by employing models and conceptual apparatus of non-Marxian historical materialism.

The aim of this paper is to paraphrase, using the terminological framework of the idealisational theory of science, the issue of the accuracy of explanation. Chris Lorenz, describing the “theoretical historical debate” on the status of scientific laws, mentioned the standpoint of Nancy Cartwright. According to him, this post-positivistic approach introduced new perspectives on understanding lawfulness. The purpose of this paper is to present assumptions of another post-positivistic approach to science, namely an idealizational theory of science and to paraphrase in the terminological framework of this approach some problems posed by Lorenz like the issue of accuracy of explanation. In this paper Hempel’s explanatory sketch is paraphrased using the terminological framework of the idealisational model of science which provides a solution to the problem of the accuracy of explanation posed by Lorenz.