Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change
Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change

Summary/Abstract: Shortly after the Polish October of 1956, C. Wright Mills came to Warsaw to learn from the experience of Polish intellectuals then fresh from the battlefields of the revolution they first spurred and later helped to contain. A few days after his arrival the new political leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, went on the radio to criticize, in no uncertain terms, the views of the undisputed intellectual leader, the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The censured professor and his friends were nonplussed; they remembered only too well the times when names appeared in public speeches only to disappear from public life. But Mills was elated. "However hard did I try to push and kick the American political establishment and spit in its face," he reminisced, "no one paid attention. In your country," he went on, "the word counts. And so the word can change things. What you, intellectuals, do," he concluded, "matters." [...]

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