PONOWNE OBSADZENIE PUSTEGO MIEJSCA – ENDECKI NARÓD I POLITYCZNA NOWOCZESNOŚĆ
Abstract
A REOCCUPATION OF AN EMPTY PLACE – NATION IN EARLY 20TH
CENTURY POLISH NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE AND
POLITICAL MODERNITY
This article examines a diachronic change in political thought of Polish
National Democracy between its emergence as a coherent political
movement and the final crystallization of its political program after the
1905 Revolution. It scrutinizes it as a [failed] answer for the political
modernity, seen as a condition of groundlessness of the social and a
radical contingency of the political. I argue that such a comprehension
can shed light on reasons for deep alternations in the structure of
national-democratic thought. From progressive social radicalism,
through politically envisioned nation-building, they turned into
exclusionary and xenophobic nationalism. The change was ushered by
the urgent need for a foundation for political thinking, ultimate
envisioning of the society as a closed, positively defined entity and
reinventing the teleological horizon. A reoccupation of the place of
legitimacy of the social order by a biologically conceptualized nation
followed. This reoccupation of the old structure of thought, imprinting
itself on the new ideas facing contingency, prevented an adequate
confrontation with political modernity and lead national democracy to an
authoritarian turn, simultaneously „closing” the concept of the nation in
Polish political thinking for years.