Ethical Resistance: Modernity,Revisionism,and the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas

Introduction: Communism and Modernity

In an interview for L’Europeo in 1980, Leszek Kołakowski, talking about the intellectual horizons of his generation, associated the ideals of the communist state of the second half of the twentieth century with the rationalist ideals of the eighteenth century: “For us, communism embodied and carried on the spirit and merits of the Enlightenment.” ¹ Although the philosopher here was referring to the past and to beliefs that he thinks his generation had misunderstood, he touched on a historical issue, which is the modernist provenance of communist ideology and its historical implementation in East European countries. ² This relationship between communism and the Enlightenment is crucial for understanding the social situation and the political choices of the first generation of intellectuals who attempted to build a communist university system in the aftermath of World War II.

The Warsaw school of the history of ideas (hereafter: WSHI), one of whose leading figures was Kołakowski, is undoubtedly a modern phenomenon in two ways. First, its members mostly came from families of the pre-war intelligentsia, which was characterized by its “grassroots” social participation in the project of modernist emancipation. Second, they were at the forefront of a “top–down” version of modernity, namely, state communism—a system that aimed to inflict shock modernization on East European post-feudal societies ³ through the use of brutal military force. ⁴ Usually, the WSHI includes the philosophers and sociologists that were first associated with the Institute for Training Scientific Cadres (IKKN) at the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (KC PZPR), ⁵ then the Department of the History of Modern Philosophy and Social Thought at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. ⁶ The most important representatives of the school are thus Leszek Kołakowski and Bronisław Baczko as well as Krzysztof Pomian, Jerzy Szacki and Andrzej Walicki. ⁷ The beginnings of the school are dated to the early post-war years, and its mature phase to the 1960s, ending with the events of March ’68. The authorship of the term “WSHI” itself is unclear. It is attributed to Rubem C. Fernandes, ⁸ Paweł Śpiewak, ⁹ and Maria Janion. ¹⁰ Sometimes, however, other people who were associated with the contemporary Polish humanities are included in the WSHI circles, for example, Jerzy Jedlicki, Barbara Skarga, Adam Sikora, Henryk Holland, Maria Janion, and others. Sometimes Zygmunt Bauman—who after 1968 worked first in Israel and subsequently in Great Britain—is also included in this group, considered as a figure biographically and scientifically related to the above-mentioned scholars. Bauman was a very important figure for the development of revisionism and the formation of dissident thinking in the Polish People’s Republic. In this sense, he belonged to the group of “open Marxists” who were active at the University of Warsaw at that time. ¹¹ The style of his work and the topics he dealt with distinguished him from philosophers such as Baczko or Kołakowski, and even from sociologists like Szacki (whose works were focused on the history of social thought, the historical theory of tradition, ideology, and utopia, which made him a member of the group of historians of political ideas, rather than a social theoretician). Although Bauman perceived himself as belonging to the same milieu ¹² as the scholars of the so-called WSHI, I decided not to examine his biography here, instead focusing on the five most important representatives of the WSHI who had a decisive influence on the development of subsequent generations of historians of ideas and historians of philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Bauman’s life and oeuvre deserve to be included in an extended version of these considerations.

In this article, I reflect on the specificity of this intellectual group that formed during the birth of the communist system in Poland. However, the questions that I ask in this context are not limited to an assessment of the Polish People’s Republic policies towards science or the relations that connected academics with the regime. First, I delve into the biographical factors that determined the political and intellectual choices of the WSHI members. Next, I attempt to determine the nature of their public attitudes, which were part of the habitus of post-war Marxist intellectuals in Poland. Therefore, my goal is to investigate to what extent the development of this intellectual environment, which included the formation and later the crisis and collapse of Polish state Marxism, was linked to traditions within the Polish left. I assume that this connection was not a simple transmission from the nineteenth century to the post-war period, but rather meant a series of breaks and migrations of ideological models, which took completely unexpected forms in different circumstances. ¹³ In this sense, therefore, at issue is not to trace the border that separated the Polish leftist tradition from post-war communism but to describe their relationship, to understand how the ethos of the engaged intelligentsia in Poland fitted into scholarly post-war biographies.

One of the questions most frequently asked when examining the heritage of the WSHI is that of its status: should the WSHI actually be called a school? ¹⁴ As the basic distinguishing feature of a modern scientific school, Ágnes Heller lists the “friendship” ties that connect its adepts and the relatively homogeneous attitude to a “common cause,” which replaces the pursuit of truth as the group’s goal. ¹⁵ Of course, this does not mean eliminating truth from research. On the contrary, it means seeking the truth not on the basis of a master’s revelation or a strict doctrine but through the very practice of research, the process of approaching objectivity. The hypothesis I would like to make from the outset is as follows: in the case of the WSHI, the element of connection was a feature that Andrzej Mencwel refers to as “culturalism” ¹⁶ —an ethical attitude that was a kind of intellectual formation to which Polish left-wing intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth century belonged. It was characterized by a social engagement stemming from a belief that it was both possible and necessary to change the social conditions of the popular classes through a cultural or ethical revolution. This culturalism connects the WSHI with the generation of pre-war intellectuals from the times of partition and constitutes, at the same time, a basic distinguishing feature of their biography that may have been a factor drawing them into supporting Stalinism.

This article is based on interviews that were collected as a part of a project entitled the “Warsaw School of the History of Ideas and its Importance in Polish Humanities” conducted by the Polish Academy of Sciences between 2011 and 2017. Between 2013 and 2015, twenty-eight autobiographical narrative interviews were conducted. The research material has been provided with various access clauses by the respondents, and thus it is not available to a wider audience. The analysis of the interviews was based on the principles of biographical methodology. The interviews were focused primarily on autobiographical issues, but following the instructions of one of the authors of this method, Fritz Schütze, in the last phase of the conversation, interlocutors were directed through the researcher’s questions towards specific theoretical issues. ¹⁷ An examination of the biographies of individual school members as well as the recollections and relationships expressed in external archival materials and sources were used to reconstruct the various biographical trajectories of post-war Marxist intellectuals in Poland, ¹⁸ which stretched between the nineteenth-century leftist ethos and the ethical turn of post-war revisionism.

Common Heritage—Social Radicalism

The core of the WSHI was characterized by the biographical trajectory, perhaps difficult to trace, but nonetheless distinct, of a generation of Polish communist intellectuals. The “school’s” most important representatives were the philosophers Leszek Kołakowski and Bronisław Baczko, who grew up in left-wing families marked by World War II. Their students, by contrast, had much more diversified roots: Andrzej Walicki came from a pre-war professorial family with patriotic traditions, while Jerzy Szacki was the son of a former soldier of the Polish Legions, in whose house the dominant tradition was the cult of Józef Piłsudski and the socialist-independence narrative. ¹⁹

Leszek Kołakowski’s father was Jerzy Kołakowski (aka “Karon”). ²⁰ In an extensive interview conducted by Zbigniew Mentzel, the philosopher recalled his father’s activity in the anti-Nazi underground:

He worked there [in Warsaw] in cooperatives, his friend was the president of Społem [the main union of food cooperatives in Poland], Marian Rapacki. . . . As a Społem employee, my father traveled a lot around Poland and handled matters for the Underground. ²¹

Leszek had remained in his father’s custody until the age of sixteen, at which time his father perished in a round-up targeting left-wing activists in the Polish Underground. Despite the early loss of a parent, Leszek must have had contact with the ethos of pre-war socialists and the subject of cooperative activity. As it turned out some years later, Jerzy Kołakowski had not been any ordinary activist; he had been active as a cooperative educator and, as a member of various ventures initiated by Jan Wolski, ²² had organized production cooperatives and was a student of Edward Abramowski—Karon had probably also encountered Abramowski himself, mentor of Polish cooperativists ²³ —and a capable cooperative theoretician. ²⁴ Thus, Leszek grew up in an atmosphere of socialist and patriotic activism at whose core was cooperative ideology—cooperativism, ²⁵ a concept that traversed the ideological divisions of the left at that time and constituted a model for a comprehensive modernization of Poland. ²⁶ Jerzy Kołakowski was once classified by Jan Józef Lipski as being part of the “generation of rebels” ²⁷ —the socially engaged intelligentsia from the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite the turmoil of both world wars, historical continuity with the rebels’ ideas is one of the paths through which Polish cooperativism reached the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), ²⁸ becoming part of the ethos of the anti-communist opposition. ²⁹

Bronisław Baczko was the son of a Polonized Jewish family. He also had a left-wing family background: ³⁰ before the war, he belonged to the Communist Union of Polish Youth, a underground youth organization of the Communist Party of Poland. He was also a member of the “Pionier” ³¹ scout organization that was allied with it. Fleeing from the Nazis, the Baczko family first arrived in Lviv before moving to Russia, where the young Bronisław joined the troops of the Polish People’s Army. He returned to the country as an officer of Polish military units under Soviet command, and in 1950 was appointed to the “ideological frontline,” as part of which he attended courses at the Institute for Training Scientific Cadres.

In the case of Krzysztof Pomian, his affiliation to the world of the pre-war left was key. The son of a Polonized Jewish family, his father was an activist in the PPS-Left Party. Owing to this, Pomian was unambiguously associated with the circles of the progressive intelligentsia that operated in Warsaw’s “red district”: the Warsaw Housing Cooperative in Żoliborz. ³²

My father had friends whom I had known since childhood because they visited us at home, because we visited them. They included the Ossowski family, Janina Sztajnbarg (later Kotarbińska), [and] Antoni Pański, who, I believe, translated Bertrand Russell—Słonimski once wrote a funny limerick about it, but I don’t remember it anymore. Somewhere on the horizon were the Themersons. . . . The Ossowski family were my father’s closest friends, so this name was extremely present. And Kotarbiński was also mentioned a lot. ³³

When asked about the specifics of this environment consisting of working-class activists, socialist intellectuals, writers, and artists associated with the broadly understood workers’ and cooperative movement, Pomian recalled:

They were tiny groups of people, all of whom knew each other. My parents knew the Wat family, and I know this because, when Ola Watowa saw me after many years, she remembered it immediately. . . . [T]hat with Andrzej Wat, who was older than me, we were up to something . . . we had probably had a fight, because what are two boys to do when one of them is eight or ten years old and the other only five? Ultimately, these were small worlds. . . . [T]he world of the Kotarbiński family, the “Kotarbiński” seminary, that’s what we called it. The world of my father was definitely the world of Żoliborz, which was comprised of entirely different people, communist workers and socialists. ³⁴

Many of his family friends, such as Janina and Tadeusz Kotarbiński or Maria and Stanisław Ossowski, ³⁵ all professors of Leszek Kołakowski at the University of Łódź, would later be his teachers. His family life blended in with the world of the socialist, communist, and cooperative intelligentsia, broadly understood. Both parents were engaged communists and struggled with constant fear owing to their political beliefs: his father, a member of the PPS-Left, then the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland (KPRP) and the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), was expelled from the party for criticizing the Moscow trials and sent to a labor camp, where he died in 1941; during World War II, his mother spent some years in Kazakhstan with young Krzysztof Pomian, and after their return from war exile became a member of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). ³⁶ Moreover, this world, on the one hand, cultivated much older traditions, ones related to the rationalist and secular worldview of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie (largely of Jewish origin); on the other, it was part of the widespread formation, in Poland, of socially engaged intellectuals, mainly from a left-wing background.

The Polish intelligentsia was one of the basic modernizing and empowering factors during the country’s occupation. There is not enough space here to elaborate on its genealogy. ³⁷ However, it is worth mentioning that this group played a significant role in Poland’s history: (1) in its own view, it constituted a kind of transhistorical link between the nineteenth-century landowners and bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and twentieth-century academic intellectuals and the middle class, on the other; ³⁸ (2) at the same time, this group possessed a symbolic capital on which is based its ethos as “leader” (of the people, the nation, the proletariat), while propagating a paternalistic discourse about the top–down modernization of the masses. ³⁹

The reference of the WSHI representatives to the phenomenon of intellectual social radicalism in Poland seems justified on more than biographical grounds. Asked about the relationship between the tradition of the left-wing intelligentsia and the post-war generation of historians of ideas, Andrzej Kołakowski, ⁴⁰ a student of Baczko, replied:

Right after the war, Adam Schaff expunged this entire tradition (with Brzozowski at the forefront), considering it as reactionary, as breeding fascism, etc. However, this tradition began to be reclaimed. . . . Baczko’s seminars on Brzozowski were indeed an event . . . because in them one discovered an intellectual perspective in which Marx appeared, but it was in a completely different language and, surprisingly, . . . a wildly modern language. . . . Abramowski’s texts began to resurface. . . . So, in a way, one source was the source of this leftist, engaged intelligentsia. ⁴¹

If we argue that the WSHI generation came to some extent from turn of the century circles that cultivated an “ethos of the left,” the thesis can perhaps be validated that, when threatened by totalitarian power, it was the activist feature of the intelligentsia of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries that was responsible for subsequent dissident and revisionist attitudes. This sense of agency, for which thinking is able to change the world, for which cognitive processes, denaturalizing the rules that govern it, are able to reformulate possible forms of action—undoubtedly connected the members of this group, including the WSHI.

Magdalena Grochowska has remarked on the influence of the culturalists’ ethos on the post-war generations of socialist youth (above all, the circle of Jan Strzelecki ⁴² ), which came from the pre-war circles of the PPS or the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. On the one hand, WSHI members were an avant-garde of young enthusiasts who actively supported the Stalinist version of socialism. Thus, in their speech and action, they dismissed the ideas proclaimed by the leftist “culturalists.” On the other, they quickly reverted to their heritage, not allowing the rebels’ social ideas to be forgotten; in a way, they rekindled the work of the rebels through their seminars, writings, and their public presence.

Hegelian Bite and Subversive Modernity

After these preliminary considerations, I would like to examine the relationship between this activist ethos and a deep commitment to Stalinism, which Czesław Miłosz once called “a Hegelian bite.” ⁴³ How could a people marked by experiences of war—including the youth, who remembered family arrests, political killings, and forced mass migration—so zealously support the formation of totalitarianism? The literature on this subject is already quite extensive, so I will not delve into this issue. ⁴⁴ Referring to the biographies of the WSHI representatives and memories of this period, I would like, however, to link their activist thinking to models derived from the pre-war intelligentsia to post-Hegelian historicism. Andrzej Friszke explained this strange phenomenon as follows:

The regime managed to harness the pursuit of social reconstruction that was still strong during the occupation as well as the drive to overcome economic and civilizational backwardness and introduce profound reforms in the anti-capitalist spirit. . . . Some young and uncritical people believed that they were involved in a real revolution that—like every revolution—the more radical the methods it uses, the deeper it is. In their opinion, this was the price to pay for creating a new society. ⁴⁵

This disturbing confusion between the sincere desire to repair the world and political violence, between “creative will” and the conviction of the inevitability of historical rights, seems to mark the first phase of post-war academic biographies. John Connelly has noted that “many Polish Communists grew to describe themselves as pragmatic Yalta Communists. In any case, they had to justify their behavior in the light of Poland’s history.” ⁴⁶ Many others, including Tadeusz Kroński, Julian Hochfeld, and Józef Chałasiński, ⁴⁷ succumbed to the promise of modernity, which is to say to the temptation to engage in projects to rebuild the social fabric on an unprecedented scale. ⁴⁸

As Andrzej Walicki pointed out, the first post-war communist intellectuals considered the Hegelian historical model to be a metaphysical source of justifying the evil employed by the totalitarian regime to bring us closer to the state of social justice:

Historical determinism, combined with the Hegelian concept of the inner sense of history, made it possible to believe that atrocities are a necessary price of progress, that evil in the present paves the way for a better future and that the realization of the greater goal of history requires further sacrifices. ⁴⁹

The author notes, moreover, that Leszek Kołakowski admitted as much in his early text “Odpowiedzialność i historia” (“Responsibility and History”). ⁵⁰ In it, he writes about a “Hegelianism for the deficient,” one that makes it possible to reconcile personal conscience—not free from reproaches associated with involvement in a criminal system—with a conviction of the supremacy of the system that was incorporating the absolute spirit into the state.

Perhaps surprisingly, the belief of Kołakowski’s generation was that communism provided a peculiar closure of history, producing the awareness of an “empty time,” which laid the foundation for Marxism as an activist ideology. Maria Hirszowicz writes that “Woroszylski, Grochowiak, Mandalian, Kołakowski—who at that time, were very young: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-olds—saw Marxism as a doctrine that would answer their important questions. Their Marxism was a militant ideology, while they were a small group of fanatics.” ⁵¹ Young Marxists were convinced that the wind of history was blowing in their favor. This wind was nothing more than a fulfilled political eschatology in which humans managed their species’ being through the devices of civilization. As Beata Bińko has written, “Some researchers point to the psychological dispositions that determine one’s direct involvement in politics. Active individuals, full of vigor, found in Marxism a meaningful participation in creating history and rebuilding the world.” ⁵² Although from today’s perspective, having such a sense of purpose may seem blind and unfounded, it essentially stemmed from the hope, which harked back to the pre-war worldview of the Polish left, that it was possible to implement a local path of modernization through communism. ⁵³ While these hopes were quickly dashed by the events of the darkest Stalinist period, between 1948 and 1953, they survived in many people’s minds until the Gomułka period starting in October 1956, ⁵⁴ which seemed to herald another possible moment to implement the “Polish path to socialism.” ⁵⁵

Let us dwell for a moment on the relationship between the two concepts of modernization and communism. As Johann P. Arnason has argued, the links between them are more than direct. Communism was vitally connected to both the main message and the negative effects of galloping modernization. ⁵⁶ The problem of modernity is the focal point that connects the engaged intelligentsia, which was part of the world of the pre-war left, with post-war involvement by young academics in building a communist state. Both the biographical rooting in the tradition of the socialist intelligentsia and its subsequent participation in academic institutions that operated under the aegis of the party are part and parcel of a modern biography that is marked by all the ambivalence of this era. By viewing the problem of “participation in communism” as a component of the panorama of possible choices faced by academics in the post-war period, we can go beyond the simplified vision of the 1940s and 1950s. This vision positively valorizes all forms of resistance to communist repression, while at the same time it presents the history of the structures of the communist state as a “black hole,” ⁵⁷ as a suspension of a history that would only get back on its proper historical tracks after the collapse of the PRL and the USSR. It appears that this is also what Andrzej Walicki had in mind when he wondered why contemporary attempts to outline the history of the WSHI do not conform with the analysis of the work of its members, as if the value of the school, which produced work during the communist period, did not consist of scholarly achievements—the results of which were famous books from the 1960s by Baczko, Kołakowski, Szacki, or Walicki—but some kind of biographical or social value. This sort of treatment of the school’s heritage stems from a specifically schizophrenic attitude that appreciated the school “as such” but simultaneously “supplanted” the awareness that we were dealing with the history of science during the PRL and the fact that, in this group, involvement in Stalinism was interlinked with an excellent level of research. Thus, as if going backwards, communism again becomes a kind of void, a shameful burden that can only be seen in a simple dichotomy of “an authoritarian regime vs unwavering dissidents.” This perception prevents us from viewing the biographies of the academics of this period in a broader perspective that would exceed their Stalinist involvement or dissident attitudes.

As Agata Zysiak has aptly illustrated, in historical analyses that are mindful of sociological modernization theory, the question about the involvement of intellectuals in communism should not take an axiological form that would entangle us in the eternal dialectic of opportunism and active support to bloody dictatorship. ⁵⁸ For, by this means, the narrative about the history of the People’s Republic of Poland is reduced either to a totalitarian tragedy—thus omitting the modernizing power of communism—or to a heroic vision of a society and nation that resisted terror and enslavement. ⁵⁹

What we are inclined to regard as a pure aberration, as a kind of historical blindness, and, at best, as a fit of youthful zeal, was set in a specific historical context: the reality of a state that had been completely destroyed by war and that required a reconstruction of unprecedented dimensions—carrying it out necessitated that many of the rules of democracy and of communal life be broken. ⁶⁰ Years later, the Polish writer and director Tadeusz Konwicki recalled that “Marxism offered me some rationalism. In contrast to our Polish metaphysical tendencies and manias as well as intellectually unverifiable categories, it offered empirical, rational ways of interpreting the world and resolving difficulties.” ⁶¹ Communism was, therefore, part of the civilizational horizon of modernity, which they considered constitutive for their personal and intellectual development, and which was violently interrupted by the turmoil of war. Recalling his background, Krzysztof Pomian linked the tradition of the Polonized Jewish bourgeoisie with the progressive ethos of the Jewish Enlightenment: “She [his mother] came from the . . . Warsaw Jewish bourgeoisie, also, as I said, strongly Polonized. . . . Yes, it was the tradition of the Haskalah. This Haskalah tradition was very much present in this house.” ⁶² For this generation, there was something of a logical continuity in the trajectory that went from the Enlightenment and social engagement to communism as a realisation of modernist ideals, and then to resistance as a return to the emancipatory ideas of Enlightenment.

However, what is perhaps most surprising in the ideological conditioning of young academics from the 1940s and 1950s is the fact that the same factors that pushed them to engage in building a communist state were, some years later, to become the leaven of an anti-Stalinist thinking that led them to oppose the authoritarian and bureaucratic course that had been imposed on society by the authorities of the PRL. To describe this generation, the sociologist Hanna Świda-Ziemba has used the term a “generation engrossed in action”:

Both at the University of Lódź and in high school, I came across quite a number of such people, “the generation’s defining intellectuals,” well-read and familiarized with the deeper layers of ideology. Among them were, for example, Jerzy Jedlicki or Leszek Kołakowski. It turned out in later years that those people who had been attracted to the ideology through in-depth studies were more inclined to be critical of the PRL system, while some even joined the opposition. Therefore, their readings would bear fruit in the future. ⁶³

What Świda-Ziemba’s recollections reveal is also a feature that would later resurface in the statements of many WSHI members, namely, that an intellectual submission to ideology, or participation in the structures of youth organizations, party, or academic institutions, such as the infamous IKKN, then later translated into an awareness of a dissonance between Marxist ideas and their supposed implementation. This was facilitated by access to knowledge, something unattainable for ordinary citizens, which they received from the Western press, films, and their limited but existent contacts with Western intellectuals and, in a later period, from scholarship visits that only people who belonged to the most elite academic institutions could afford. Marcin Kula, historian and the son of Nina Assorodobraj-Kula and Witold Kula, ⁶⁴ commented on it as follows:

Baczko and Kołakowski, for example . . . well, I can’t recall the names at the moment, but it doesn’t matter—they were all IKKN students. Somehow they later managed to free themselves from it. The IKKN could work in a number of ways; it worked a bit like the “Janissary revolt”—they were pampered so much that they were almost pampered to death until they rebelled. In addition, they did get a relatively good education; paradoxically, they had access to materials that many people didn’t. ⁶⁵

While producing “intellectual Janissaries” well-equipped to fight against the enemies of the official ideology (such as the adepts of the Lviv-Warsaw school, theologians, old socialists and Western philosophers), the system also gave these intellectuals the opportunity to acquire knowledge at the highest level, opportunities that provided them with the tools to contest the prevailing system. ⁶⁶ As Beata Bińko has emphasized, the IKKN trained both ideologues to serve the party and future dissidents ⁶⁷ —both of these groups resulted from the same socialist policy that aimed to lead the way toward a comprehensive social reconstruction. ⁶⁸ The WSHI members, who came from the IKKN, thus developed competences that enabled them to engage in criticism of the communist system, and then led them, once they felt it was irreformable, to reject it entirely in the late 1960s.

Revisionism as an Ethical Turn

For many members of the WSHI community, left-wing ideals and Marxism as a theory of emancipation were the “starting point” ⁶⁹ of their biography. For Walicki, what proved key in this context were the events of October 1956, that is to say, the internal revolution in Polish Marxism, which had a lasting impact on the views of academic philosophers. If the events of March 1968 were seen as putting an end to hopes for systemic change in communist Poland, ⁷⁰ October should be viewed as the founding moment of the opposition discourse within the party. It is also a catalytic moment for the WSHI as a homogenous environment. ⁷¹

Andrzej Walicki believes that one of the key experiences for the forming of the WSHI was the distance it took from Stalinist ideology after 1956. Walicki writes, “The common denominator of the WSHI was not Marxism, passed down through regular educational methods to the pupils of an elite party university, but a deeply experienced, negative reaction to the totalitarian practices of Stalinism and the ideological catechism that justified it.” ⁷² He also notes that although the biographies of Warsaw historians are often associated with this period, it is not Stalinism—which, far from a generational experience, he treats as an element of individual biographies—but rather its rejection that triggered the formation of the WSHI circle. The emergence of this circle thus relates more to the rejection of the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism as a historical teleology, as a vulgarized Hegelianism based on an obsession with practice in the name of “absolute spirit.”

The remedy that the revisionists adopted against the perverse cult of the individual was socialist humanism. The essentialism of Stalinist anthropology had to be surpassed by revisionist criticism, both politically—by calling for a turn to the tradition of socialist humanism—as well as methodologically—by assuming the anthropological dimension of the historical process, and thus the social conditioning of thinking in human praxis. ⁷³ Years later, Walicki wrote: “First of all, for me ‘the anthropocentric hypothesis’ was an inevitable consequence of the interpretation of historical materialism as a historically and socially conditioned human practice, which implied the unavoidable ‘humanism’ of our knowledge.” ⁷⁴ Rejection of party orthodoxy, criticism of Stalinism, and opposition to the growing dictatorship of the monoparty—all these features of revisionism related directly to consolidating the specific anthropocentric attitude of Kołakowski, Baczko, and to some extent also of Pomian and Szacki. ⁷⁵ Andrzej Walicki openly admits this and believes that it was probably straight after Stalin’s death that the first two distanced themselves from the hard core of the prevailing orthodoxy. ⁷⁶ Reflecting on the beginnings of the dissident attitude among WSHI members, the sociologist and student of Bronisław Baczko, Nina Kraśko, stated:

They were certainly in opposition, in the sense that they were revisionists, there is no doubt. Everybody was! And they emphasized revisionism differently. Kołakowski and Pomian were revolutionaries and revisionists, unequivocally so. As for others, they did not speak out so unequivocally. I mean, they were critical, but critical within the system. In fact, even Kołakowski and Pomian did not say that they wanted, for example, capitalism with or without a human face. This problem did not appear at all. . . . However, they certainly were part of this trend. There is no doubt that they were revisionists who strongly criticized the system. ⁷⁷

In Kołakowski’s article “Odpowiedzialność i historia,” which is part of a series of revisionist texts from 1955-1957, the author attempts to outline what he calls an ethical socialism able to reconcile determinism—understood here as a methodological rule—with the autonomy of political agency. In another text from this period, Kołakowski condenses Marxism into a series of rules and guidelines for the social sciences. He draws out specific features of Marx’s method that can be seen as valid for far more than studies conducted in the spirit of Marxism–Leninism. He does this to save Marxism as an idea that has a lasting, historical impact on the social sciences and not simply as a dogma or as the fixed guidelines of a political ideology.

“Marxism” in this sense does not denote a doctrine that must be accepted or rejected as a whole. It does not mean a universal system, but a vital philosophical inspiration affecting our whole outlook on the world, a constant stimulus to the social intelligence and social memory of mankind. ⁷⁸

This definition of the concept of Marxism was intended to bolster revisionist opposition to the party, by establishing a basis from which it was possible to counter the party leaders using the very terms of class struggle.

The progress of socialism can thus be gauged through the ethical revolution within the party itself and, even more, a reevaluation of the categories of progress itself. Hence, we are dealing here with a viewpoint whose subversiveness lies in its ability to reconcile the historical development of socialist systems with an emancipatory element. In this way, the purport of this revolution came closer to the grassroots and community philosophy of Edward Abramowski and other social radicals of the late nineteenth century. ⁷⁹ (There is a reason why revisionists like Jacek Kuroń, Karol Modzelewski ⁸⁰ and Krzysztof Pomian referred mainly to the traditions of workers’ councils as well as to Polish cooperativist ideas.) Moreover, thus understood as one of many possible paradigms, Marxism could no longer have an everlasting monopoly on the truth.

For today it is clear that several of Marx’s ideas have not survived the merciless test of time. His predictions as to the future course of history, especially, were as fallible as most predictions are. Such ideas retain only the significance of utopias, that of moral stimulus rather than scientific theory. ⁸¹

For Kołakowski, by taking philosophy as an external ideological apparatus, and giving it the form of a completed project, we blend a utopia with a transcendental pattern, reducing it to an ideological tool of mass management. As he aptly noted in another text, thus understood “utopian consciousness” is an elementary component of culture, and is therefore a guide to all movements seeking change.

Still, this does not make it realizable. Utopia always remains a phenomenon of the world of thought; even when backed by the power of a social movement and, more importantly, even when becoming its consciousness, it is an inadequate consciousness, going far beyond the movement’s potentials. It is, in a way, “pathological” (in a loose sense of the word, for utopian consciousness is in fact a natural social phenomenon). It is a warped attempt to impose upon the historical reality of the movement goals that are beyond history. ⁸²

As early as in 1955, Kołakowski considered Marxism not to be a set of irrefutable dogmas sanctified by reason or office, but a concept of social criticism capable of self-transformation. ⁸³ In this “ethical turn,” we can see both the WSHI’s initial commitment to the Stalinist version of Marxism and the subsequent anti-establishment attitude. As a call to accept the historical challenge and reconstruct the country in the spirit of socialism, as well as a criticism of the Polish United Workers’ Party that culminated in the events of June 1956, Marxism is a doctrine arising from an imperative to rebuild the world from within through one’s own actions. Particularly in the context of the latter inspiration, revisionism appeared not as theory but as practice. As Pomian put it, “I belong to the generation and especially to this political formation, where political and social activity was something natural, understandable, and obvious. It was understandable and obvious that we did not stop at scientific work.” ⁸⁴ It was not an intellectual formation, but instead an idea, an ethical attitude: “revisionism was never a true body of theory. It was a humanist idea shared by individuals—professors, philosophers, artists, economists, writers or citizens.” ⁸⁵

Conclusion: The WSHI as an Ethical Community?

As Marta Bucholc has argued, the WSHI does not meet the two basic criteria that would define it as a school of thought. Nor, crucially, was it a school in the sociological sense.

Firstly, the scholars considered as members of the WSHI did not recognize their collective separateness and did not articulate it. Instead, they felt they were members of wider schools and methodological directions within Marxism. . . . Therefore, both the identity and its articulation were missing. . . . [T]he WSHI had neither a master nor patron, neither circles nor internal structures. ⁸⁶

Secondly, there are no clear reasons to recognize its specificity in terms of methodology. For Bucholc: “The WSHI methodology was characterized by inherent intuitionism, which was probably the result of the reluctance of WSHI representatives to absolutize any doctrines or values.” ⁸⁷ This latter feature of the history of thought developed by the WSHI seems to be one of the most important elements of the specific historicism that marked the work of its representatives. Nonetheless, this specificity is assessed in one way by Andrzej Walicki—a representative of the school who insisted on its actual existence (including in the methodological sense ⁸⁸ )—and wholly differently by other WSHI members, such as Kołakowski, Baczko, or Szacki, all of whom rejected the notion that they belonged to the WSHI. At best, this issue of belonging was one that they avoided entirely, considering it an idle diversion, or possibly a problem of categorization, the sources of which should be sought in the minds of the students and successors of the aforementioned scholars rather than in themselves. ⁸⁹ However, to grasp the “phenomenon” of the WSHI within the social history of the Polish People’s Republic, one does not need to turn to conceptualism in the area of the sociology of knowledge, but rather refer to what we have already recognized as a distinctive feature of the said environment: revisionism. As noted by Andrzej Walicki, revisionism was a basic component of the WSHI worldview, although it was not a set of methodological imperatives issued by any school members, nor was it a phenomenon that distinguished this group in terms of sociology.

This solution seems to be suggested by Bucholc herself: “However, despite the non-school-like character of the WSHI in terms of methodology and sociology, another, less commonly applied criterion deserves consideration: I am thinking of the ethical norms that should govern a scientific activity.” ⁹⁰ However, ethics, in this context, means something more than the rules that govern proper scientific conduct. It refers to the mission that the subject undertakes and develops, both in the private and public spheres. As many of the above-quoted commentators have pointed out, the WSHI members followed the mission typical of the modern intelligentsia, by building the ideological framework of communism and then by opposing the cult of the individual. Their conviction about the role of the public intellectual guided both their thinking and their actions (their activities as part of the political opposition in the 1970s and subsequently also as “teachers of wisdom”—this certainly applies to Leszek Kołakowski, ⁹¹ as it does to Krzysztof Pomian in his commitment to the fight for workers’ rights in the PRL). If the members of the WSHI used Marxism in their dissident activity, it was “humanist Marxism,” meaning a kind of “sensitivity” to public affairs rather than merely a cognitive imperative; an ethical idea rather than a collection of indisputable truths. ⁹²

As Adam Schaff, the chief architect of the PRL’s science policy in the first years of communism, recalled, “How was our Marxism different from the Soviet one? Above all, our culture was broader.” ⁹³ Even a person so strongly involved in creating regime policies could remark on the difference between the Polish tradition of leftist activism and the Soviet model of state ideology. At this point, Schaff’s position came closer to the one that Andrzej Mencwel had expressed in his book Etos lewicy (Ethos of the Left): the distinguishing feature of the Polish leftist tradition is its social sensitivity, its radicalism, which rejected the revolutionary fight in favor of work at a grassroots level, and, consequently, its strongly humanistic and ethical trait: culturalism. In Soviet Russia, the workers’ intelligentsia, decimated by successive purges, was to some extent a product of Bolshevik science policy and the attitude of the party to artists, writers, and academics. In Poland, however, the leftist intelligentsia managed to develop a separate cultural worldview (which was disrupted by World War II but not completely interrupted by it). This has been an important element not only of Polish academia but also of Polish political life, and even became synonymous with modernization during the Second Polish Republic. I do not mean to say that the post-war scholars involved in communism were the direct heirs of the ethos of the intelligentsia from the earlier generations, but only that their biographies were often points at which earlier influences from the leftist tradition merged with the new institutional and ideological communist order. They reflected anew on the old modernist ideas of the global establishment, while they also developed the tools to contest the oppressive state socialist regime. Consequently, there is an historical and biographical line that connects the ethos of modernity, the tradition of the Polish social intelligentsia and post-war revisionism, a line that ended up with the establishing of the WSHI, and which then continued through to the subsequent generations of protestors—KOR and Solidarity—who drew inspiration from it. ⁹⁴