Recenzja: Katarzyna Wrzesińska, "Kultura i cywilizacja w myśli Narodowej Demokracji (1893–1918). Między ideą wychowania a polityką", Warszawa: Instytut Slawistyki PAN, Fundacja Slawistyczna 2012, ss. 377.
Review of a book by Katarzyna Wrzesińska, Culture and civilization in the thought of National Democratic Party (1893–1918). Between the educational idea and politics, Warszawa: Instytut Slawistyki PAN, Fundacja Slawistyczna 2012, pp. 377.

Summary/Abstract: The book by Katarzyna Wrzesińska, a historian of ideas and Polish political thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, a researcher of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has an ambitious aim to deal with cultural politics of National Democracy, the largest political movement in the history of Polish lands, at the fin-de-siècle. The further themes are, among others, definitions of nation and folk in the nationalist framework, the role and place of educational ideas in a wider scope of the nationalist project, an influence of nationalist ideas on the Polish intelligentsia. Interestingly, Wrzesińska does not correspond with current social sciences debates about definitions and understandings of nationalisms in literature, but tries to step outside them altogether. Undoubtedly, such a new framework would have helped us move forward in studies on Polish nationalism. Paradoxically though, while the book analyzing a wide array of published primary documents, it offers, in the end, a well-known and conventional story on ‘young idealist’ debouched whether by mass-politics or by masses as such. The rhetoric of nationalism is quite evident but not equally obvious from Wrzesińska’s presentation are the ways in which people appropriated that vocabulary and those ideas for their own ends. The author gives then another casual tale on an innocent but cultural nation and, first and foremost, its elites beset by brutal and uncivilized enemies. Epistemological naiveté, surplus of not analyzed details and quotations, and, last but not least, rather surprisingly narrow catalogue of questions does not address how and why the Polish integral nationalists differed from other national strains of this time. All in all, unfortunately, the book does not help to capture the complexity of National Democracy in the Polish history of the period under discussion. Not only it does not substantially extend our knowledge on the subject, but as well obscures and blocks serious questions about this political movement and its toxic legacy.

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