| dc.description.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. | en |
