Andrzej Walicki – författare

This book introduces the English-speaking reader to the thought of Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911), the outstanding Polish philosopher and literary critic. Although practically unknown in the West, Brzozowski is an important but neglected forerunner of the intellectual tradition of `Western Marxism', most commonly associated with Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci.Concentrating first on the early phase of Brzozowski's thought, Professor Walicki goes on to analyse his ideas on the working class and its relation to the intelligentsia and contemporary working-class ideologies. Finally he deals with aspects of his thought which go beyond the Marxian problematic and round off the intellectual portrait of the man.Brzozowski's anti-naturalistic approach resulted in a radical reinterpretation of Marxism which dealt with many of the problems of the revolt against positivism in European philosophy. Professor Walicki argues that the retrieval of the philosophical and humanist aspect of Marxism, and its separation from the Engels-inspired `scientific Marxism', was the achievement of Brzozowski and not, as frequently assumed, of Lukács, who came to similar conclusions only some ten years later.By placing Brzozowski within the cross-currents of the various philosophical, sociological, literary, and political streams of Western and Eastern European thought in which Marxism was situated, Professor Walicki produces a fascinating study of an early East European challenge to orthodox Marxism.

Renowned historian Andrzej Walicki here challenges the conventional understanding of the rise of nationalism and the nation-building process in East-Central Europe.Arguing that the views advanced by Hans Kohn and others are marred by an inadequate knowledge of Polish history and thought, Walicki examines the emerging nationalism of the eighteenth century in a comparative perspective. He shows how Poland, the largest state in East-Central Europe, developed a modem national consciousness and, in fact, a political nationalism earlier and more successfully than has generally been acknowledged.Walicki presents his case by examining the main currents of Polish thought in the Enlightenment from Noble Republicanism to the development of the progressive constitution of May 3, 1791. A final chapter analyzes the ideas of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the leader of the Polish uprising of 1794, showing him as an ideologist of "new republicanism" and a bridge between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. This chapter will be of particular interest to readers familiar with Kosciuszko as a hero of the American Revolution.

This book presents an analysis of classical Russian Populism, shown as an ideological structure within which many positions were possible. Walicki studies the confrontation of Populism and Marxism: changing attitudes toward Marxism in the Populist milieu and the controversy between Populists and Marxists over the future of Russia.The Controversy over Capitalism, available here in paper for the first time, reinterprets the ideology of Russian Populism. Andrzej Walicki argues that Populism is a reaction to the development of capitalism in Russia and a response to the capitalist economy and socialist ideologies of the West.

A Stanford University Press classic.

The aim of this book is to carefully reconstruct Marx and Engels's theory of freedom, to highlight its centrality for their vision of the communist society of the future, to trace its development in the history of Marxist thought, including Marxism-Leninism, and to explain how it as possible for it to be transformed at the height of its influence into a legitimization of totalitarian practices.The relevance of the Marxist conception of freedom for an understanding of communist totalitarianism derives from the historical fact that the latter came into being as a the result of a conscious, strenuous striving to realize the former. The Russian Revolution suppressed "bourgeois freedom" to pave the way for the "true freedom" of communism. Totalitarianism was a by-product of this immense effort.The last section of the book gives a concise analysis of the dismantling of Stalinism, involving not only the gradual detotalitarization but also the partial decommunization of "really existing socialism." Throughout, Marxism is treated as an ideology that has compromised itself but that nevertheless deserves to be seen as the most important, however exaggerated and, ultimately, tragically mistaken, reaction to the multiple shortcomings of capitalist societies and the liberal tradition.