Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland

Alexej Lochmatow is a Walter Benjamin Research Fellow at the University of Erfurt. He got his PhD from the University of Cologne and the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interest lies in the history of science and humanities, public knowledge, and intelligence research.

'It might seem that the communist takeover in Poland after WWII has been thoroughly covered by historians, but Alexej Lochmatow shows that in fact it has not—precisely because everything about those years has been shoehorned into an oversimplified narrative of “communist takeover.” Obviously no one would deny that the absorption of Poland into the Soviet sphere of influence cast a long shadow, but the scholarship of the past decade or so has revealed that the there was a great deal more variety, indeterminacy, and space for local agency than we once imagined. Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland is an outstanding contribution to this trend.'Brian Porter-Szűcs, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor'Alexej Lochmatow’s work is a very competent and often brilliant introduction to the subject matter, especially for a reader unfamiliar with it. However, it will also be valuable for insiders and specialists thanks to the analytical tools used and the interpretative perspective proposed by the author. These are the features that make the value of this book go beyond a simple reconstruction of intellectual life in a certain Central European country in a certain post-war decade'Łukasz Bertram, Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa'The book would be of interest to scholars studying the history of science and scholarship in both Poland and other post-socialist Central and Eastern European countries. For the English-speaking reader, the study provides the contexts and excurses essential for bringing such a ‘national’ history to a ‘foreign’ audience in a comprehensible way. Polish readers would gain not only from the already mentioned original methodological perspective, but also the wide-ranging transborder bibliography the monograph offers. Moreover, the chosen theoretical framework and the shift of focus to the agency of the Polish actors, in a relationship usually described as dominated by the Soviet Union, opens the possibility of a comparative approach to the material.'Violetta Korsakova, Jagiellonian University

• 1. From the War to the ‘Gentle Revolution’ 2. The Many Faces of the Soviet Union 3. The Teachers of Virtues: The French and the Early Post-War Project 4. The Polish Intelligentsia and an Anti-Authoritarian Vision of Society 5. Between ‘Outdated’ Marxism and ‘Updated’ Catholicism 6. The ‘Failed’ Quest for Unity 7. The School of ‘New Virtues’ 8. ‘1956’ as a ‘Diagnosis’ and ‘Prognosis’. Epilogue: The Concept of Virtues as a Lens.