The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the nationalist right also took it on board to protect (...) the cultural hegemony of the Poles in the areas where they were a minority. Tackling the nexus of the emerging nation-state and the ensuing logic of minoritization sheds light on tiered visions of citizenship essential for understanding the 1921 debate. For this purpose, I use various available sub-corpora of texts—political leaflets, press, and parliamentary debates from the period 1788–1922. (shrink)

This article appraises the political writings of three Polish Marxists from the early 20th century, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanisław Brzozowski and Rosa Luxemburg. In the specific peripheral conditions and because of the entanglement of different struggles in the Polish Kingdom under Tsarist rule around the 1905 Revolution, it was no longer possible for Marxists and political theorists to refer to any firm political ground: whether the organic unity of the nation, class antagonisms, or laws of history. The construction of revolutionary subjects (...) in Luxemburg, the political rethinking of national community and the realistic ‘agonistic’ conception of democracy in Kelles-Krauz, and Brzozowski’s anti-essentialist Marxism, with its mobilizing power and politically constructed subjects of social change, are peculiar, peripheral forms of political Marxism, today worth looking at one more time. (shrink)

The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political language, ushering them into the public sphere and allowing them to comprehend the emerging capitalist world. As (...) a particular liaison of scientific knowledge and a practical political weapon, it allowed its adherents to redefine themselves and make political claims. Such a situational Marxism, drawing from but not reducible to the prevailing ‘orthodoxy’, allows one to see the latter as a socially diverse plethora of ideas. (shrink)

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. (shrink)