Polish Paradoxes

Stanisław Gomułka is a chief economist of the Business Centre Club and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics from 1970 to 2005. During this period, he also held senior professorial and research fellowship appointments at a number of academic institutions, including Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Stanford Universities in the USA.Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University, USA and Chief Historian of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014). In 2011, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania.

• Introduction Part 1: History and politics 1. The three traditions in Polish patriotism 2. Holy ideals and prosaic life, or the Devil’s alternatives 3. The Polish syndrome of incompleteness 4. The Catholic Church, the Communist State, and the Polish people 5. Solidarity’s adventures in wonderland Part 2: Culture and political economy 6. The incompatibility of system and culture and the Polish crisis 7. The Polish intelligentsia in a crisis-ridden society 8. The myth of the market and the reality of reform 9. Poland’s economic dilemma: ‘de-articulation’ or ownership reform’ 10. The decay of socialism and the growth of private enterprise in Poland Part 3: Social attitudes and everyday life 11. Contradictions in the subconscious of the Poles 12. The ties that bind in Polish society Afterword

Review of the first publication:‘A most welcome book…offers the reader in the west an insight into the complexity of Polish politics.’— International Affairs