Wolna myśl w zniewolonym kraju

Abstract

Despite the state control of political and intellectual life in Poland in the second post-war period, the society’s creative thought did not die. Various political thoughts, concepts and ideas were still intensively developed both in the circle of the early communist authorities and circles associated with them as well as in the opposition. A special role in fostering the democratic and libertarian style of political thinking of the Poles at the time of the events in October 1956 and during the following period until the late 1960s was played by the socalled revisionists, and in the next two decades by the so-called reformers in the Polish United Workers’ Party. The very camp of the communist regime tried, to varying degrees, depending on internal and international conditions, to pave the way for and to implement the Polish raison d’etat by conducting the political realism policy, modernization of social relations and ensuring the secular nature of the state. In the final period of its rule, it sought possibility of compromise with the anti-communist opposition and of integration of the principles and institutions of social and ideological pluralism as well as the mechanisms of free market economy with the system of real socialism. However, the traditional trends and orientations of the Polish political thought were most fully rebuilt and developed by the anti-communist opposition, emerging since the mid-seventies. It abandoned the illusory conviction, held by rebels against the real socialism system, about the possibility of its reform and expressed different, sometimes bold and innovative visions and projects of the reconstruction of Polish relations, adding new values and ideas to the Polish political thought of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.