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Rozmowa z Maciejem Janowskim
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This article introduces how the concept of “the intellectual” travels among languages and national cultures, disciplines (philosophy – history – sociology), and also between everyday language and scholarly language. In various stages of this travel, the concept experienced periods of popularity and glory but also exile and devaluation when it became a politicised label. The example of the concept of “the intellectual” shows that the adoption of concepts in a given local context depends on social reception and socio-political conditions. Consequently, it is impossible to analyse the travel of concepts without an analysis of social phenomena. Therefore, the author of the article suggests reading Travelling Concepts in the Humanities by Mieke Bal from the perspective of historical and interpretative sociology.
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The paper deals with relations between Czech and Polish sociological communities. In both countries, sociology was institutionalised shortly after the First World War, liquidated by the Communists, and renewed in the post-Stalinist period, but in Communist Czechoslovakia, it developed relatively freely only during a brief period in the 1960s. There existed a mutual interest between the sociologists of the two countries, although they did not have much contact, except in the 1960s. Most of the time, the Czechs were more interested in Polish social science than the other way around. The intensity and asymmetry of their relations can be best explained by the changing position of both countries within the international scholarly community. After the Second World War, they remained on the semiperiphery of the Western scholarly community, even though in the Communist period they belonged to the supposedly alternative world of Marxist sociology. The exceptional position of Polish sociology in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s was therefore the result of its role as an intermediary for accessing the dominant Western sociology.
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Stefan Nowak’s thesis on the sociological vacuum is the most frequently referenced statement on Polish society. This article introduces how Polish society was perceived “from the outside” by the use of the vacuum concept and shows attempts to apply the concept to other societies. The sociological vacuum is compared to other similar concepts: the loss of community, the hourglass society, and the missing middle approach. The concept’s travel between four domains (Solidarity, civil society, social capital, and the qua- lity of democracy) is presented. The concept of the sociological vacuum has not travelled beyond the Polish context because it is strongly connected to the assumption of Polish uniqueness. During its travels through various thematic domains, the concept transformed, and it is currently a buzzword used to explain phenomena undesired by sociologists.
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This essay follows Mieke Bal’s narrative on travelling concepts stemming from failures in interdisciplinary communication in academic discussion and teaching. Her approach is compared to Polish scientist Antoni B. Dobrowolski’s project of an archive of biographies of creative thought (1927) that aimed to solve specific problems in the Polish educational system. Whereas Bal sheds light on the intersubjective potential of concepts, Dobrowolski aimed to question scholars to get insight into the thickets of thought. Both initiatives for stronger academic introspection are compared and the latter’s failure is examined against its historical background, namely a general tendency of self-optimization, represented by a German collection of autobiographical texts by great scholars edited by Raymund Schmidt and others.
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The article analyzes the preparation for the construction of the Suez Canal. The purpose of the research is to study this idea as thefirst in the history of the enterprise, originally planned with foreign capital participation. Ferdinand de Lesseps was the main figurein it. The study of this issue will significantly expand the understanding of the world economic system formation in the XIX centuryand the inclusion of the Ottoman East into it. The historical background described in the memoirs of contemporaries and above allin Lesseps’s own correspondence makes it possible to understand the attitude to the Suez Canal in the highest political circles ofFrance, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. The study found that the Suez Canal completely changed the balance of power inthe region, as well as the geopolitical structure of Egypt and the entire Middle East. The analysis of the sources revealed that theidea of building the canal was implemented within the framework of the philosophical concept of “industrialism”, which emergedfrom “Saint-Simonianism” in the 1830s. Saint-Simonian ideas in economics, in their liberal version, were accepted by Napoleon IIIthrough his close adviser Michel Chevalier, and Lesseps, being one of the representatives of “industrialism”, was the first to put theseideas into practice in such a large-scale format.
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The article studies the process of organizing the interdepartmental training courses for mobilization personnel of the civil People’sCommissariats and other government agencies, using the case of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), thelargest USSR republic, and documents which have not been used for such research so far. At the turn of the 1930s, the first interdepartmentalmobilization plan of the Soviet state was created. Military and civil mobilization preparation was assigned to civil People’sCommissariats and agencies, where special mobilization divisions (cells and units) were formed. The lack of experience and knowledgeamong mobilization cells members, who were to organize mobilization activities of the civil People’s Commissariats and otheragencies, hindered the effective formation of the nationwide mobilization plan. The first training courses for civil mobilization personnelwere established at the military district headquarters in 1927 and 1928. They were assigned to various People’s Commissariats andhad low throughput. In 1929, amid changes in the country’s system of interdepartmental mobilization leading bodies, the Red ArmyHeadquarters and the RSFSR State Planning Committee proposed the options for the reorganization of the existing training courses.This resulted in establishing standard interdepartmental training courses for civil mobilization personnel, which were territoriallyassigned to the military district headquarters.
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The article discusses the activities of Viktor Ivanovich Klishko as the commissioner of the Council for the Russian Orthodox ChurchAffairs in Karelia in 1950. The research documents are represented by unpublished sources of the National Archive of the Republicof Karelia. V. I. Klishko’s personal archive file, stored in the National Archive, is a particularly valuable source of information. Theresearch methodology is a set of approaches – a combination of prosopographic, historical, psychological, and qualitological approachesin the context of modal biography. This approach enables to minimize the research subjectivism in assessing the ideologicaland behavioral dominants of the Council’s commissioner as an actor in history. It was established that the appointment of VictorKlishko to the post of the commissioner of the Council for the Russian Orthodox Church Affairs was facilitated by a set of factors:the vector of the Church-state policy at the central and regional levels, as well as Victor Klishko’s professional and managerial experience.The author concludes that as the commissioner Victor Klishko achieved significant results in transferring churches to statecontrol according to the cultural and social needs of the population of Karelia during his six months in office. A clear strategy of VictorKlishko’s management activities enabled to expand the scope of activities of the commissioner in the field of negative campaigning.Following his personal highlights and accents, as well as many years of anti-religious experience, the commissioner supportedrepressive measures against the Church. These measures were tested by Klishko in practicing “militant atheism” during the 1920sand the 1930s. Victor Klishko’s transfer from the commissioner’s post was the result of the opposition between the Council for theRussian Orthodox Church Affairs and the Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the CommunistParty, as well as the lack of corporate communication and polylogue with the objects of Church-state relations.
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The article devoted to the consideration of the current situation in the study of the history of Medieval Rus’, focuses on the problem of political instrumentalization of history in modern public discourse. It is characterized as disintegration. The previously unified field of research is rapidly breaking up into separate “clusters of study”. A decisive factor in this process of foundation in the Eastern Europe many new national states, finding their roots in history. At the same time, there is a fragmentation and disintegration of the previously unified field of research, including in the field of medieval studies, and the appearance of “its own Middle Ages” in each national historiography. The disintegration of the field of research also leads to the disintegration of a single language of science — first of all, not even in the “national key”, but in the conceptual plane, since the presence of “one’s own Middle Ages” also presupposes the formation of one’s own conceptual language of its description and study. The author puts forward the thesis about the need for axiological understanding of Medieval Rus’ — as a historical era, a single subject of research in the historiography of different countries and at the same time a unique cultural phenomenon in its completeness, which is a common heritage of three East Slavic peoples. To achieve this goal, the author proposes the concept of “Byzantinization” of the history of Old Rus’. Studies of the historical and cultural heritage of Byzantium are a vivid example of “integrating” historiographic paradigm. The history of Byzantium as a scientific discipline managed to avoid fragmentation and was constituted as a kind of “thing in itself”, a selfsufficient historical and cultural value that does not require legitimation through its significance for modernity. The author constructs his argumentation in the form of seven theses, each of which considers one of the topical problems of modern historical knowledge, including in the field of Eastern European medieval studies (discourse of patriotic rhetoric in history, discourse of ideological justification through history, discourse of context and understanding, discourse of unity and / or divisions, discourse on the limits of interference in history, discourse of constructivism in history, discourse on the relationship between science and society).
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The so-called Bavarian Geographer describes the ethnopolitical situation at the end of the first half of the 9th century in a wide area of Central and Eastern Europe. The names of those tribes are mostly recorded in their Germanic forms, as they were known at the time among the Franks. Those names are in their Slavic forms basically authentic, quallificative in their nature, created according to certain collective characteristics that their bearers attributed to themselves. Thus we can assume that those tribes brought those names from their ancient homeland when they settled the Elbe region, and that could be corroborated with the fact that some of those tribal names appear also among the South Slavs (Obodrites, Serbs, Milingoi = Milcians?). In the area of the ancient Slavic homeland itself, in the basin of the upper Oder, Warta, Vistula, West Bug and Upper Dniester, it lists a number of tribes that can be divided into two groups. The first would include those who still kept their old names and ancient tribal identities The second group includes tribes, which, judging by their names, were new, territorially based tribes, composed of members of various tribes that during the migrations stayed at their homes. Based on the ethnonymic material from the treatise of the Bavarian Geograph and other early medieval sources, one important conclusion can be reached about the Slavic ethnonymy — in naming of the tribes, peoples and communities, the Slavs held much more to the essence than form. The names derived from the same root occur often with different suffixes, and sometimes for one and the same tribe the names are derived from another, but semantically identical root.
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The article explores the image of Poland and interest in the matter of regaining independence in selected positions of the American press of the era. Although this was not a leading issue due to the complicated internal situation in America (like the war of independence or the first presidential election), the Polish issue was often written about after the Kościuszko Uprising. The outbreak of World War I initiated a continuous debate on the issue of an independent Polish state that lasted for years and although it was often described as impossible to fulfill, it was welcomed by American society with great enthusiasm.
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The article is an effect of observing the phenomenon of omission of Byzantinescientific literature in Russian language in the works of Polish researchers, especiallythe younger generation. Due to the need for sharing the basic findingsof Russian Byzantine scientists to a wider group of Polish readers I decided tocommit this text, which was planned as part of the cycle including the analysisof Russian candidate and doctoral dissertations available in free access, owingto a well-developed database of such studies in Russia. Subjects of papers included in my article relate primarily to literary and philosophical issues, historyof art, as well as historical and political issues of the Byzantine Empire.
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The purpose of the article is an analyze the evolution of the concept of justice – from antiquity to modern times. The author expresses the point of view that today the term justice corresponds more to the political sphere than the legal one, because for Lawyers, in principle, does not give rise to major disputes. The original foundations of justice for a lawyer remain stable. The problem arises when we shift the accents to the social sphere. Then it turns out that we have no indisputable, universally approved grounds.
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