Historical Sociology in Poland: Transformations of the Uses of the Past

Theoretical Framework and Methodological Reservations

In this article, we employ the concept of sociological field, following Tomasz Warczok and Tomasz Zarycki’s diagnosis regarding the structural limitations of pursuing critical sociology in the semi-peripheries. ¹¹ Warczok and Zarycki argued that the weakness of Polish critical sociology was caused by the structural properties of the sociological field, in particular by its relatively low autonomy in relation to the field of politics. Warczok and Zarycki pointed out the interplay between the privileged role of the sociological elites as members of the intelligentsia, also dominant in the field of power, and the relatively low autonomy of the sociological field. They suggest that as a result of the low autonomy of the sociological field in Poland, the actors in the field are forced constantly to position themselves vis-à-vis the doxa of other fields, notably the political one. They have a choice of getting involved—thus compromising their own neutrality and, as a consequence, the autonomy of the field—or resign themselves to marginalization and abandonment. Warczok and Zarycki’s approach was criticized by Mikołaj Pawlak, who pointed out that—besides uncritical reliance on the Bourdesian heuristic scheme—they fail to account for the structural properties of the sociological field resulting from its legal and institutional embeddedness. ¹² Pawlak also stressed the uncertainty of the rules in the field as a result of institutional reforms and the new top-down pressures coming from the political field and the field of public administration (much more than from the market or the economic field).

However, despite their different reconstructions of the sociological field in Poland, both Warczok/Zarycki and Pawlak agree that theoretical commitments and references are one of the main assets in the field, and the way they are used bears upon the understanding of the rules of the field. We accept their approach and focus on the uses of the past, which we take as representing trends in positioning in the sociological field and constitutive of a subfield of historical sociology. In this, we follow an insightful suggestion of Michał Łuczewski that the domination of the intelligentsia in Polish sociology leads to the emergence of a specific form of capital which he calls “reflexive capital”: the ability to create historical analyses of Polish society. ¹³ From this perspective, uses of the past are crucial for the distribution of reflexive capital and relevant both for the structure and for the autonomy of the sociological field. Thus, historical sociology, explicitly dealing with the past, deserves particular attention as a forge of reflexive capital and as a laboratory of struggles against peripherality.

In examining the positioning of actors in the sociological field, we rely on a study of books published in Poland by authors based in Poland. This limitation results from three methodological considerations.

First, despite the large volume of historical-sociological scholarship which we examine in this article, the label of “historical sociology” is not a well-established one in Polish academic categorizations. Therefore, we included in our analysis books which fulfill the criterion of applying sociological theories to the study of the past to “make theoretical sense” of it. ¹⁴ Therefore, although the authors of the works under analysis would usually be academic sociologists, their academic affiliation is not a criterion. By that token, we decided to exclude the many works by academic sociologists whose main goal is primarily to document the past, to preserve and communicate historical evidence. However, as the positioning effect of such works, notably those pertaining to Holocaust studies and the wartime history of Polish society, sheds light on the current state of the sociological field and on the relationship between sociology and history, we will discuss it briefly in the final section of this article.

Second, limiting our scope to authors based in Poland is of primary importance for connecting the positioning effects of the works under analysis in the sociological field, which is structured as a national one. In the increasingly mobile academic world of the beginning of twenty-first century, the assumption that intellectual interventions by authors based at academic institutions in Poland should be considered in a study of a subfield of the sociological field in Poland seems the least problematic of the many alternative ways to operationalize positioning in the Polish sociological field. However, it undoubtedly does not do justice to the increasingly complex nexus of academic mobility and international cooperation and competition.

Third, we have limited our analysis to books. While the value of journal publications both in domestic and in international journals for scientific careers in Poland has grown significantly as a result of reforms in scholarly administration and funding, book-writing remains a standard in Polish social sciences and humanities. ¹⁵ Therefore, we treat books published in Poland as the best indicator of trends in the field, but we are fully aware that we are dealing with a field under transition. In particular, an increase in the relative weight attached to journal articles in international journals and monographs published abroad since the 2018 reform of higher education in Poland can be expected to affect the role of monographs published in Poland. However, it may also result in a new division of labor, with some themes optimized for addressing international audiences and developed in articles, and some tailor-made to cater for domestic needs in book form. In fact, that is exactly what our findings suggest.

Historical Sociology in East Central Europe: On the Limitations of the “Three Waves” Model

An influential narrative of the history of historical sociology envisages its development as a sequence of three waves. ¹⁶ According to this narrative, after the sociological classics of the first wave, a period of relative stagnation followed, and the comeback of historical sociology was only brought about by a “second wave” triggered, among other things, by the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s.

The foundations of American historical sociology of the second wave in the 1970s and 1980s—which was also when its contemporary disciplinary identity took shape—shared the prevailing style of the sociology in those days: it was largely quantitative, comparative, and based on the construction of theoretical models. The objects of study were “big structures, large processes, huge comparisons.” ¹⁷ Early historical sociology was close to political economy in that it studied states, inequalities, social conflicts, and processes of modernization in general—all these themes in various comparative contexts. American historical sociology of the second wave in the 1990s was fully recognized and domesticated as a sociological subdiscipline. ¹⁸ However, the modus operandi of historical sociology has changed since. The second wave has been criticized because of its relative closure to the global dimension, boundedness by the nation-state perspective, ¹⁹ and having been tied to diverse forms of state-centrism. ²⁰ As an explanation of these tendencies, it has been suggested that historical sociology, striving to legitimize its scientific status distinct from that of history, set upon causal explanation based on an analysis of socio-structural variables.

The ongoing so-called “third wave” is characterized by an orientation toward culture and a focus on individual agency. ²¹ Moreover, third wave historical sociology is eclectic and inclusive as far as research subjects are concerned, which leads to methodological and theoretical fragmentation. ²² Today, historical sociology may include research that also qualifies as neo-institutional, postcolonial, feminist, and social memory studies. Such inclusiveness shifts conceptual boundaries, which may be read not only as a consequence of the cultural turn in the social sciences but also as a result of the decreasing importance of Marxism as a source of inspiration, following, among other things, the fall of the Eastern Bloc. ²³

Historical sociology in East Central Europe has not developed in a linear manner alongside the Western variant, and differences among the countries of the region are substantial. While in some countries, such as Czechoslovakia and later Czechia, historical sociology has a long tradition and can claim a place of its own among the sociological subdisciplines, ²⁴ in some others, as in Russia, it is only now emerging as a self-standing field. ²⁵ The differences in size of national sociological communities and their volumes of scientific production play a role in this intraregional diversity, as does the structure of funding, the level of internationalization, and the availability of suitable domestic publications. ²⁶

One relative constant that marked many East Central European sociological traditions compared to that in the West was their endorsement of public engagement, which routinely interlaced with political activity in a region marked by intense state-building and nation-building processes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We agree that the “anachronistic label” of a public sociologist “should not be taken too far.” ²⁷ However, the label seems to apply rather well to Czech sociology with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, to Hungarian sociology with its early division into the nationalist and Western-universalist agendas, and to Romanian sociology with Dimitrie Gusti’s concept of “sociologia militans,” ²⁸ or its manifold concern with the burning peasant question. ²⁹ The work of Gusti’s younger collaborator, Henri H. Stahl, is an excellent example of the creative value of combining the pre-war experience of engaged sociology with a Marxist commitment and an agenda of sociohistorical studies. Along with a reformist drive, a concern with social problems, and a strong national focus, a historical orientation was among the common features of public sociology in the region.

Arguably, a strong adherence to the model of nation-building and the nation-state framework was not a part of the sociological tradition in all the socialist countries. In some of them, the nation-building processes would be disrupted, discontinuous, or framed by ethnic and political conflicts. It has been argued that sociology in Yugoslavia developed at least partly in opposition to historical narratives that have been described as “romantically nationalistic,” ³⁰ and its inability to rely on the findings of academic historians resulted in its methodological emancipation and uncharacteristically vivid interest in primary sources of knowledge about the past. ³¹ However, the agenda of problems including the agrarian question, the situation of the peasantry, and the general modernization of social life was also pivotal for the development of Yugoslav historical sociology, as was the reference to the national question, however diversely defined, and the public profile. The succession to these achievements in historical imagination in the national sociologies which emerged after the division of Yugoslavia is debated. For example, in 2003, in their introduction to a reader in historical sociology comprising both classical works and contemporary works, Ljubiša Mitrović and Dragan Todorović described historical sociology as a discipline that is still “new and insufficiently developed” in Serbia. ³²

One additional consideration would be the role of Marxism in various national sociologies of the East Central European region. This is probably the most marked difference between the three-wave model and the East Central European trajectory of historical sociology. As opposed to the American experience of Marxism as a source of inspiration for the second wave of sociohistorical thinking, opposing the mainstream of static ahistorical theorizing, in the Eastern bloc the historical inspiration drawn from Marxian thought was limited by its status as a top-down imposition and by its ideological use and hegemonic function. For these reasons, while Marxism as a common theoretical denominator could have consolidated a regional Eastern European sociology, it failed to do so. ³³ However, this did not prevent the reception of Eastern Marxist sociological theorizing in the West beginning in the 1960s, a limited international mobility, and the exchange of ideas in international fora, notably in the International Sociological Association: Eastern sociology’s international connectivity certainly benefited from the rise of the second wave in the West.

Against this background, the path of Polish sociology displays the mixed effects of national particularities and factors typical of East Central European countries. The common factors include imperial subordination before 1918, the phase of hectic nation-state building in the first decades of twentieth century, the traumatic and devastating effect of the Second World War, the long period of socialism, and the experience of rapid social transformation, qualified by some as another deep cultural trauma. ³⁴ Apart from the size of both Polish society and sociology, the country-specific factors include a substantive pre-1939 tradition of institutional sociology, the relative immunity of Polish sociological academia to the impact of Stalinism and ideological pressures in general, the devastating effect of 1968, the role of the Polish Sociological Association for the consolidation of the national sociological community, ³⁵ the relatively high level of internationalization, and the unique experience of the Solidarity movement. ³⁶ The public or civic orientation, though indicative of a regional affinity, also had a country-specific colour, which was demonstrated by the post-communist transformation.

Historical Sociology in Poland before 1989

Traditions of Polish social thought date back to the mid-nineteenth century. ³⁷ However, much of the original intellectual production predating 1918 was discontinued after Poland reemerged as an independent state in that same year and the process of academic institutionalization of sociology began. ³⁸ In the period between 1918 and 1939, the historical connection of sociology continued largely undisputed and unproblematized.

Research interests and theoretical affiliations of emergent Polish sociology were largely contingent on the biographic and intellectual trajectories of its primary actors. A direct but mostly theoretical concern for sociohistorical questions surfaced in early Marxist sociology, notably in the works of Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941). In the interwar period, this line of thinking shifted toward the study of contemporary social problems and did not result in empirical sociohistorical studies. On the contrary, Durkheimian sociology took a historical turn in Poland, while its impact was mediated, among others, by Durkheim’s student Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937) (see Czarnowski, 2015). Although Czarnowski wrote on Celtic religious traditions before his return to Poland in the aftermath of the First World War, his students—notably Nina Assorodobraj-Kula (1908–1999)—continued to work on historical material. ³⁹ Finally, the biographical method was particularly well adopted to the study of matters that occupied the sociological imagination of the interwar period, ⁴⁰ and this grew to be a Polish specialty, partly but not exclusively owing to the influence of Florian Znaniecki. Moreover, Znaniecki published Spenglerian essays on the fate of Western civilization ⁴¹ and contributed to other research areas akin to historical sociology, including studies of nations and nationality, another distinct area of study that was in full bloom in Polish sociological thought before 1918, and studies of the intelligentsia as a social class. ⁴²

The impact of interwar traditions on the later vicissitudes of Polish sociology was non-negligible, both because of what they introduced and because of what they lacked. First, the culturalist approach of Znaniecki influenced Polish sociology very strongly: the focus on cultural problems such as consciousnesses, values, beliefs, identities, and attitudes prevailed over interests in social institutions and structures in their own right, even after 1945 in the works of sociologists who adhered to the Marxist agenda. But the crucial factor was the fate of the sovereign Polish state, reinstated in 1918 after 123 years of non-existence. This political resurrection raised new issues of identity, national identification, and historical embeddedness of identity-related imaginaries. It also provided sociology with a new impulse towards engagement in domestic matters and reframing scholarly strategies to fit into the new institutional framework of a nation-state in the making. As a result, the focus on the internal problems of Polish society foreclosed international and intercultural comparative studies. Finally, despite the short duration of the interwar period, it was crucial in establishing the main patterns of scientific research, in terms of both intellectual styles and research matter.

Some parts of the interwar legacy turned out to be a liability after 1945 under Stalinist communism and, later, under real socialism. In 1945, the Polish state was ideologically reformatted and geographically reset. Despite the different reshufflings of scientific policies pursued by the state depending on the decade of the Polish People’s Republic, Marxism remained the fixed reference for scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. As it quickly turned out, Marxism did not always favor the historical imagination. ⁴³ However, several scientific schools and research areas with a distinct historical profile in the social sciences evolved on Marxist foundations in the postwar period. Two of them, especially, deserve attention due to their interest in studies of the past: the Warsaw school of the history of ideas and the Warsaw school of economic history.

The Warsaw school of the history of ideas, which existed from the 1950s until 1968, comprised a collective of scholars, including, among others, Leszek Kołakowski, Andrzej Walicki, Jerzy Szacki, Jerzy Jedlicki, Bronisław Baczko, and Krzysztof Pomian. Prevalently but by no means uniformly Marxist, the group was characterized by a relatively loose methodological connection and a great diversity of interests. Despite or maybe because of this, the school inspired the intellectual life of—mostly Warsaw—academia. Since the school’s focus was on the history of ideas, the intersections with historical sociology were not infrequent. Despite its dispersal and the emigration of many members after 1968, the school remained one of the most influential circles of Polish postwar academic life, although its influence was not conveyed through any institutionalized channels. ⁴⁴ It was recently argued by Bartłomiej Błesznowski that in the Warsaw school of the history of ideas, the historical orientation was inherently connected with a program of reformist social engagement. ⁴⁵ However, the main works written by one-time members of the School after 1989 and by their younger collaborators were consequently located in the field of history of ideas and intellectual history. ⁴⁶ Exceptions to this research profile would qualify as the historical sociology of knowledge, with a bias toward analyses of the intersection of political beliefs with other forms of knowledge and usually with a distinct political, critical edge. ⁴⁷

The Warsaw school of economic history played an important role in both Polish and global economic historiography between the 1950s and 1970, owing to the high international standing of its main representatives, Marian Małowist and Witold Kula. ⁴⁸ The influence of the school both reflected and stimulated the great productivity of economic historians at home, intensely focusing on the economic life of Poland up to the late eighteenth century, when Poland ceased to exist as a state. In this period, Polish history was definitely relatable internationally. Besides biographical factors, the decrease in the school’s influence was also due to new global methodological trends, especially including the turn toward more culture-oriented approaches to social history. ⁴⁹ Nonetheless, a revival of the school’s legacy can be observed in the contemporary turn toward the study of agrarian relations and the peasantry in the new historical sociology, which we discuss in the next section.

Apart from these two schools, the intersections with historical sociology continued the interwar agenda in several prewar research areas, although sometimes by different methodological means: studies of the intelligentsia, of national consciousness, of the working and peasant classes, and of class consciousness. But the most important field in which sociohistorical research flourished was regional studies, and it was also the field in which there was both an interplay of politics and historical sociology, and the public engagement of the latter.

A characteristic feature of Polish regional studies was the emphasis on the subjective aspect of regional identification, which to a large extent consisted of the cultural context, including the historical one. ⁵⁰ The past was an indispensable element of the description of the regional bond and the subjectively perceived regional identity, called “private homeland.” ⁵¹ A historically changing relationship with the ideological homeland, that is, identification with the nation, was also explored. The geographical areas in which these studies were implemented included, first, the Recovered Territories, which were the former German territories allocated to Poland after 1945 whose German populations were expelled to make place for masses of Poles relocated from the East. Starting from the 1960s, conceptual categories from the modernization perspective were used to describe these lands’ regional problems. ⁵² This was the effect of economic reflection on the socioeconomic development of regions, which successfully competed with the culturalist approach. Owing to both theoretical and ideological interests, sociologists were interested in the new regions’ degree of integration. The scholars expected newcomers to adapt effectively and domesticate the space they inhabited ⁵³ and assumed that the areas attached to Poland would become model modern regions of the socialist state, in which there would be massive social advancement and a breaking with traditional structures. The regional studies demonstrate in a nutshell the difficulties that sociology in general was facing at the time. The past was rejected and overcome, prewar ideas about society and nation largely delegated to the domain of the mythical, and attention turned toward the construction of a new reality and the monitoring of the effects of social change. Marxist philosophy was assumed to provide a sufficient basis for reconstructing the historical context.

Something that deserves a few words in this regard is the international networking of Polish sociology. The discipline had a promising start with a few well-connected leaders; to those already mentioned, we should add the name of Leo Petrażycki (1867–1931) who after 1919 held the first chair for sociology in Poland at the University of Warsaw. However, as early as in the letters of Czarnowski to Henri Hubert from the early 1920s, the sense of the overwhelming impossibility of efficient research activity was omnipresent, owing to financial, organizational, and political uncertainties in the newly established country and to the ubiquitous bigotry affecting academic work. ⁵⁴ The good international standing of people such as Czarnowski and Znaniecki did not translate into good networking by their students and collaborators, which could have provided a critical impulse for the new discipline. The pattern reappeared after 1945. Although individual Polish sociologists enjoyed a high standing in the international community—first and foremost Stanisław Ossowski (1897–1963)—this did not directly result in strong international networking for the whole discipline due to a combination of political, ideological, and economic reasons. Hence, the second wave of historical sociology did not happen in Poland the way it did in the West, although the 1970s were a period of relatively stable institutionalization of the discipline and an intense interest in the main Western paradigms and styles of thought. There was a general sense that the reception of Western state-of-the-art sociological thinking was necessary for the development of the discipline in Poland: the urge “To America,” which Antoni Sułek described as characteristic for the post-1956 period, prevailed in the next decades. ⁵⁵ References to Western and, in particular, American scholarship had a powerful positioning effect at the time. However, Polish sociology of the 1970s proceeded to absorb exactly the variant of sociological thought that was frequently at odds with the turn toward historical thinking. With its strong though not uncontested presence of Marxism, Polish sociology was struggling to become more quantitative, specialized, empirical, and institutionalized in a number of subdisciplines. As a result, the field was becoming decreasingly disposed to thinking in terms of long social processes. Nonetheless, new research agendas added to the spectrum of historically oriented sociology in Poland in the 1960s, such as Barbara Szacka’s studies of social memory, which continued until the beginning of the twenty-first century. ⁵⁶

To summarize, it seems that the historical imagination of sociologists both suffered and benefited from the prevalence of Marxism under early socialism. The effects of the opening to the West and the 1970s’ hegemony of American sociology, along with the rise of historical expectations in the 1980s, were also far from unambiguous. The turn toward the present that commenced in the 1970s found reinforcement in the rise of the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement, which remains one of the greatest sociological puzzles of the time. The workers’ protest gave an immediate impulse to studies of social movements and popular political agency. ⁵⁷ They were typically put in the immediate context of the Polish socialist state’s social dynamic, while an understanding of the historical mechanisms of social change was secondary to an analysis of the movement’s internal logic. In a way, instead of becoming an impulse for more historical reflection about society, the experience of Solidarność acted to the contrary. The fact that Polish sociology “had not foreseen Solidarność” was treated as evidence of the insufficient theoretical refinement of the discipline and its deficit of knowledge about society in the here and now. ⁵⁸

In 1989, at the end of sixty years of institutional development of sociology in Poland, historical sociology was not an institutionalized subdiscipline. Western trends in historical-sociological thinking were received and developed. ⁵⁹ However, their impact was not comparable to that of many other innovations imported in the 1990s, including studies of social capital or new institutionalism. Polish historical sociology got caught between waves and was exposed to strong adaptation pressures. Several research traditions were in the same position, ready to be developed or dropped in the new social and political reality. However, sociology at large enthusiastically turned toward the study of the present and great expectations for the future.

Historical Sociology: The Main Themes after 1989

Polish historical sociology after 1989 followed the general pattern of Polish social sciences and humanities in that single-authored monographs published in Polish by publishers based in Poland represented the core of its production. Only a few authors managed to reach out directly to international audiences, including Piotr Sztompka and Jadwiga Staniszkis. As far as publications in journals are concerned, there is no single forum for historical sociology that would be comparable with the Czech Historická Sociologie.

The period after 1989 brought a series of deep reconstructions of the Polish academic field, ⁶⁰ including its sociological subfield. Legal and institutional restructuring was far from being guided by a single reformative agenda, and it shifted from radical deregulation and marketization in the 1990s to rising neoliberal regulation in the late 2000s, with an increase in ideological conflicts and top-down pressures, especially after 2015. We do not discuss these developments in detail here for lack of space to cover them adequately, but two aspects of the institutional and legal change seem to have a direct bearing on the vicissitudes of historical sociology. First, as opposed to the situation before 1989, by the late 2020s international connectivity and relatability have become a systemic requirement and no longer a mere additional factor increasing (or not) the domestic professional chances and prestige of selected individuals. Consequently, the rules of the national sociological field have changed: the value of internationalization has increased, and the relation to regional and global academic fields translates into the position of individuals in the national field. ⁶¹ The principle of international relatability can be realized by connecting to theoretical streams and research directions in global sociology. On the other hand, actors based in Poland are still positioning themselves in the national sociological field, whose restructuring did not involve a decline in mythoclastic ambitions: the program of public, civic sociology was not abandoned. This exposed sociology in Poland to a new double bind: historical sociologists in Poland are pushed to seek the possibility of positioning themselves in their national sociological field and subfield marked by its tradition of civic-minded mythoclasm while at the same time seeking a connection to global sociology. This will naturally favor strategic theoretical and research choices which can serve both purposes, and in the following section we identify a number of such strategies increasingly employed after 1989. ⁶²

Main Directions of Contemporary Polish Historical Sociology

Despite its thematic variety, the current production in historical sociology in Poland displays several common traits. First, it consists in reanalyzing imaginaries more than anything else. Dealing with the past is a means of capturing the process of creating the structures that define Polish society today. Most often, the texts consider mental structures, such as shared ideas and imaginaries that create communities. Current publications examine the origin of contemporary collective identities and of the Polish public sphere, along with the diversity of political attitudes. These texts use references to history so as to reconstruct the genealogy of contemporary collective identifications and dominant systems of beliefs. This concerns the explanation of regional differences in political attitudes and electoral behavior. ⁹¹ However, the particularities of social development, especially in the Recovered Territories, are also scrutinized as a positive basis for new local identities. Sociologists study the cultural mechanisms of constructing the region and the evolution of how local and regional identification is experienced. ⁹² Playing with the past is identified as an important element of image management for local communities, and also as a vital component for the construction of their members’ individual identities. Sociological studies offer a critical diagnosis of stigmatizing discursive mechanisms that construct the social identities of East-Central Europe’s inhabitants today. Narratives about the past constitute the main component of discursive strategies that impose ideological images on the eastern regions of the continent. The mechanism of orientalization expresses the symbolic domination of the world center over peripheral areas. ⁹³

Moreover, Poland-based sociologists currently revise and reinterpret a set of commonly accepted narratives about the past that form the social imaginary of contemporary Poles. The high wave of sociohistorical studies of the working and peasant classes is one example of this critical revision. These studies offer a reading of history which highlights the history of the lower classes, especially the social consequences of peasants’ legal subjection, political deprivation, and permanent marginalization. ⁹⁴ The study of the peasant class also has potential for global connectivity, as shown by the recent book arguing a strict analogy between serfdom in Poland and slavery in the New World. ⁹⁵ Historical sociologists also try to recreate the process of shaping the national consciousness of this—until quite recently—most numerous stratum of Polish society. ⁹⁶ It has been pointed out recently by Marta Gospodarczyk and Łukasz Kożuchowski that the rise in studies of the history of the peasant class in Poland was triggered by the electoral victory of the national-conservative Right in 2015 and 2019. ⁹⁷ On the one hand, the structure of political support for the conservative-national parties revived the old heuristics of the deficits of the people standing in the way of democracy. On the other hand, the category of the people —as opposed to the elites—was brought to the fore by the necessity to understand the political choices made by the people. The program of studying the peasants as the historical substrate of the people in the political sense was articulated by ardent proponents of public sociology. The turn toward studies of the peasantry is one of the most distinctive phenomena in the sociological field in Poland, testifying to the possibility of combining the striving for international connectivity and relatability with a commitment to a program of public and civic sociology.

However, the revision and debunking of myths also involves the study of elites, especially of the intelligentsia, whose claims regarding its cultural and political role for over a hundred years are critically being examined. The status of the intelligentsia is explained by its long-standing cultural hegemony, expressed in full domination of the space of ideological formation of national identity and state-building since 1918. ⁹⁸ The unsuccessful attempts of the working class to interfere in the intelligentsia’s hegemony are now studied as model cases of political takeover of ideas. ⁹⁹

These historical analyses by sociologists primarily seek to reinterpret various contemporary diagnoses of Polish society. They often contradict historical myths that form the core of the Polish identity or, at least, its politically sponsored projects. Contemporary Polish historical sociology frequently provokes a lively public discussion about the aspects of Polish history that have been excluded from public awareness. ¹⁰⁰ One consequence of the focus on the analysis and reanalysis of imaginaries that seldom receive scrutiny is that these studies rarely employ empirical data. Polish historical sociologists mostly write books about books. These texts only rarely employ archival materials. Only a few current works in this field are based on the study of primary sources. Most sociological interpretations elaborate materials gathered and pre-processed by historians. But there is also a community of young historians interested in sociology who have conducted research on Polish society during the communist era. Fifty-seven monographs based on primary sources were published in the In the land of the Polish People’s Republic publishing series, including studies of everyday life, history of ideas, and history of historiography. This was the result of Marcin Kula’s historical seminar where for many years he had promoted the idea of historical sociology. ¹⁰¹ Discourse-oriented historical sociology, in Poland and elsewhere, frequently draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, concepts, and research practice. ¹⁰² Using the past is conflated with the study of contemporary ideas about it, which is one of the reasons for the frequent use of critical discourse analysis.

Conclusion

Historical sociology in Poland focuses on tracing and reinterpreting imaginaries that connect the past with the present, putting them in new theoretical framings, of which the center-periphery idiom seems to be one of the most powerful. The conspicuous domination of symbolic peripherality over economic or structural peripheralities may partly result from the relatively greater weight attached to the cultural dimension in economic peripheries. ¹⁰³ However, the focus on the symbolic sphere is also a consequence of the methodological choices of historical sociologists preferring discourse analysis to other research approaches. Be that as it may, the prevalence of the symbolic in historical sociology increases its chances of public resonance, as shown by the works of the peasant turn. It also reduces the likelihood of “falling out of the sociological field,” which we would like to discuss briefly in connection with the perception of the Holocaust studies conducted in Poland, illustrated by the reactions to the famous 2021 court case against Barbara Engelking of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Jan Grabowski (University of Ottava).

On 9 February 2021, the District Court in Warsaw issued a judgment regarding the chapter authored by Barbara Engelking published in the book Dalej jest noc, edited by Jan Grabowski. The book described the murders of Jews in Poland under German occupation. A relative of one of the persons named by Engelking sued the author and the editor for misrepresenting his character. ¹⁰⁴ The lawsuit initiated a vivid national debate. ¹⁰⁵ While it is not possible to discuss the political, legal, and institutional factors at play in this case, we would like to draw attention to one fact: although Barbara Engelking is a qualified sociologist holding a PhD and a habilitation in sociology, the case in question was publicly perceived as putting “historians on trial.” ¹⁰⁶ The work of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences led by Engelking was assigned to the field of academic history rather than (any kind of) sociology, and so was the publication whose content was contested before the court. Without having conducted a detailed analysis of the public statements regarding Engelking and Grabowski’s case, which would lead us too far off the main subject of this article, we suggest that reactions were framed primarily as a concern for the freedom of historical pursuit of truth about the past, or for the freedom of academic research in general. The sociological pursuit of understanding Polish society then and now seemed secondary, although the latter was obviously the primary politically relevant framing from the point of view of the political Right attacking the defendants. ¹⁰⁷

We believe that the case of Barbara Engelking marks a persistent division of labor between sociology and history. Revealing the past and documenting its discovery is the job of historians. Sociologists dedicate themselves to reinterpreting the past in theoretical terms more than to generating new insights into what it was. This is why Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a sociological book, and many would even be surprised to hear that it might be considered historical sociology, because in this book the past is clearly just a starting point for theoretical reflection. On the other hand, Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbours, arguably the most influential book on Polish-Jewish relations in the context of the Holocaust, written by an academic sociologist and telling the truth, vehemently contested by many as applicable to contemporary Polish society, seems to fall into the general category of historical studies. The book caused an immense ripple effect in Polish public discourse, but it was not interpreted as a sociologist’s voice. ¹⁰⁸ History is a larger and far more established field in Poland and elsewhere, and the probability of moving from the field of sociology into that of history is increased in the case of those works in historical sociology which display the characteristics of historical research: they deal with primary sources, use archival material, and are based on a literature review that includes more fact-finding than theoretical interpretation. This, in turn, has a direct effect on their political contextualization. The political context constitutes the primary framework in transformations of socioscientific uses of the past. Undoubtedly, debates and conflicts about the past currently hold a very prominent place in Polish public discourses and in local and state politics. ¹⁰⁹ The works of historical sociologists are a part of this debate as much as they were a part of the debate about the transformation of the 1990s. Today, these works mostly explore social imaginaries, including discourses about Eastern Europe, regional imaginaries of community-formation, origins of contemporary collective identities, and the functioning of the Polish public sphere. The study of collective memory also belongs to this category. These thematic fields strongly resemble the current state of historical sociology of the third wave, with its dominant themes of cultures, imaginaries, and collective memories.

Making theoretical sense of the past has a political dimension. Therefore, we may view reinterpreting history as a form of critical sociology, which can manifest itself as latent mechanisms of the long-term creation of Polish society’s images. Thinking in categories of center and periphery reveals the tension in the role of Polish social researchers as peripheral intellectuals who are stretched between being “here” and “there” at the same time. Historical sociology is a solution to this problem. It might have been a debatable positioning move, placing the actor at the margins of the sociological field, in an insecure location of limited relatability in the national sociological field striving for more specialization, institutionalization, and methodological specificity combined with the urgent need to focus on the Polish society as it is now. But in the global sociological field it is a very different matter. An interdisciplinary, problem-oriented approach may transform the handicap of locality into an advantage of relatability in the global setting. By referring to the past, the younger generations of historical sociologists may strive to undermine the established understanding of history with a view to unveil the vast area of the hidden potential of social subjectivity, but they may also succeed in reaching beyond their national field. However, sociologists who pursue this line of thinking belong to a long tradition of Polish civic—or public—sociology, and thus garner capital which is relevant in the national field. ¹¹⁰ Political engagement and political relevance are important for the sociological field, and history ranks very high among the themes of public debate in Poland. It would support the thesis of Zarycki that the state of the sociological field is a consequence of the domination of intelligentsia, for which “the figure of the re-working of the burden of history” plays a pivotal role. ¹¹¹ The reflexive capital accumulated by the intelligentsia also stresses its structurally conditioned need to produce holistic narratives of the past embedded in particular political contexts. ¹¹² Reflexive capital is a receipt for civic engagement, and historical sociology is increasingly competing with history as a locus for its generation and reproduction. The bearers of reflexive capital strive to liberate the collective consciousness of Polish society from the spell of historical myths in order to restore its intellectual independence and autonomy. The irony is that the emancipatory agenda of historical sociology in Poland—as across the whole East Central European region—is driven by the same zeitgeist that fuels the politics of history aimed at eliminating any plurality of visions of the past.