Florian Znaniecki

Immersed in Everyday Life. Analyses of the Borderland of Literature and Biography

A collection of articles on the practices of creation and analysis of texts on the borderland of literature and biographical writing. The authors undertook interdisciplinary research on personal documents, confronting the interpretative approaches in social sciences, philosophy and literary studies. In addition to the theoretical considerations on the textological studies of sociocultural phenomena, the volume contains analyses of the relationships between the life and works in the writings of Jerzy Pilch, Henryk Elzenberg, Stanisława Przybyszewska, Gerhart Hauptmann and Andrzej Bystroń.

Keywords: biographies, personal documents, diaries, autobiographism, autofiction, epistolography, extended reality, interpretation.

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a multivolume masterpiece by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki published between 1918 and 1921, came to define early American sociology. One of its most important contributions was the influential social disorganization paradigm, which distinguished primary-group organization, social disorganization, and social reorganization. This paper contends that nation-building and the civil incorporation of Jews in postwar Poland and the United States were important background conditions for the creation of this social disorganization paradigm. This thesis is supported with a threefold comparison. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is contrasted to Old World Traits Transplanted, a book published in 1921 and largely written by Thomas, though credited to the American sociologists Robert Park and Herbert Miller. This textual comparison makes possible a further comparison of social reorganization in Polish territory and the United States. Lastly, the essay highlights the contrasts that Thomas and Znaniecki drew between Poles and Jews within each of these national contexts, and the role these contrasts played in the development of the social disorganization paradigm. The paper concludes with some reflections drawn from The Polish Peasant in Europe and America about why the civil incorporation of out-groups sometimes fails, and how it might succeed. [This is a Polish translation. The paper is available in English upon request.]

La sociologia è il modo in cui una società inter-preta se stessa. Il modo in cui i sociologi polacchi hanno prodotto le proprie ricerche ci dice dunque qualcosa di significativo anche sulla società polacca. Per quanto riguarda l'era contemporanea, la storia della Polonia può essere divisa in quattro periodi principali: la fase delle Spartizioni (1772-1918), in cui la nazione non esiste come entità politica indipendente; la fase della Seconda Repubblica Polacca, tra le due guerre mondiali (1918-1939); la fase della Re-pubblica Popolare Polacca, stato 'satellite' dell'Unione Sovietica (1944-1989), e infine la fase della Terza Repubblica Polacca, nata con la caduta del muro di Berlino (1989-ad oggi). In questo articolo si mettono a confronto alcuni percorsi sociologici, collocandoli nella cornice storica in cui si sono sviluppati.

This article aims to highlight the influence of the work of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki on the perception of social reality by sociologists. I focus on the social practice of creating personal documents (memoirs, autobiographies, and letters) as a form of enacting individual agency and speaking their voice in the social space. I show the contribution of various social classes in this memorializing practice in Poland, reaching back to the 17 th and 18 th centuries. While doing so, I emphasize that a big part of society was practically muted in literary discourses. The voices of peasants and working-class were silenced as they had no access to the means which would enable them to speak and be represented in the discourse. Against this background, we can see how the "memoir competitions"-a very popular research practice being introduced in Poland by Znaniecki in 1921-have changed the power relations in the field of generating knowledge about social reality. The institution of Polish Memoirism that systematically gathered a huge number of autobiographies, enabled the poor and voice-less to speak and be heard by social researchers. In this sense, the monumental work of Thomas and Znaniecki was a trigger to the gradual process of revealing "blind spots" on the map of social reality and giving voice to the muted. Throughout the article, I return again and again to the main methodological questions, that is, what does it mean to include the consciousness of the participants of social life in sociological research, how to represent them in sociological theorizing, and how they can regain their voice in the scientific narrations about them.

Burada ele alınan değerlendir- mede, iki yönlü bir kavramsal çerçeve izlenecektir; birincil olarak, sosyolojinin esasında kurucu ilişki kümesini teşkil eden göç ve kent olgusunun ön plana taşınması hedeflenmektedir. Göç ve kent olgusunun irdelenmesi salt konut sorunuyla, kent içinde kimliksel olarak Suriyeli göçmenlerin kendilerini nasıl tanımladıklarıyla ilgili değildir, aynı zamanda iktisadi faaliyetlerin kesafeti ve farklı örüntüleri - küçük dükkân sahipliği, ürün tedarik ağları, iş kurma ve sürdürme yönündeki faillikler, işçi-işveren ilişkileri- de içermektedir.
İkincil kavramsal çerçeve, Gaziantep’in kentsel dokusunun geçirdiği hızlı dö- nüşümle ilintilidir. Her büyükşehir gibi, Gaziantep de 2010’lu yıllara dek hinter- landını oluşturan bölgelerden ciddi ölçekte göç çekmek suretiyle bugün tanıdığı- mız kentsel formuna erişmiştir. Öte yandan, 2011-2012’den itibaren, Suriyeli göç- menlerin şehre intibakı, Gaziantep’in temel toplumsal yapılarında hızlı ve etkin değişmelere yol açmıştır. Gaziantep’te Suriyeli göçmenler, kamuoyunun tahayyülünün taşıdığı biçimde kendilerine özgü bir alt- kültür oluşturmamışlar, Gaziantep’in kentsel -ekonomik, toplumsal ve kültürel- makroformuna uygun bir şekilde uyum göstermişlerdir. Bu metin Znaniecki ve Thomas'ın zihin açıcı ve temel öneme sahip çalışmalarını değerlendirerek kent sosyolojisi ile göç çalışmaları arasındaki mesafeyi olgusal verilerle çalışmaya çağırmaktadır.

Anarchiści – ludzie zniewoleni wolnością

Anarchizm jest kierunkiem myśli politycznej, w którym idea wolności stanowi wartość najwyższą. Wolność w anarchizmie traktowana jest jako pierwotna wobec innych wartości. Czy zatem to jej maksymalizowanie jest przyczyną aktywności ruchu anarchistycznego, czy też motywacje anarchistów bliższe są teoriom nowych ruchów społecznych? Czy o obliczu ruchu decydują jego uczestnicy? Czy są oni „zboczeńcami nadnormalnymi” – jak chciałby Florian Znaniecki, czy też liderami myślenia i działania – jak chciałby Piotr Sztompka, a może ludomanami, którzy łamią schematy uniformizacji kulturowej – jak chciałby David Riesman? Czy anarchistom przysługuje kategoria podmiotowości politycznej, czy też może jej brak jest przyczyną frustracji i maksymalizowania idei wolności dla zyskania minimum swobód? A może maksymalizowanie idei wolności w myśli anarchistycznej prowadzi do paradoksu zniewolenia jej „wyznawców” właśnie przez wolność?

Słowa kluczowe:
Anarchiści, wolność, typy osobowości, charaktery

The Summary
Anarchists – people enslaved by freedom
Anarchism is a trend in political thought, in which the idea of freedom constitutes the highest value. Freedom in anarchism is treated as primal in relation to other values. Is, then, its maximizing the reason for the anarchist movement activity or else, are the motivations of anarchists closer to the theories of new social movements? Is the nature of the movement decided by its participants? Are they “hyper-normal deviants” – as stated by Florian Znaniecki or the leaders of thinking and acting – according to Piotr Sztompka? Or perhaps, are they peasant maniacs who violate the patterns of cultural uniformity – as David Riesman would like it to be? Are anarchists entitled to the category of political subjectivity? Or, is the lack of this category the cause of frustration and maximizing the idea of freedom in order to gain the minimum of liberties? Or perhaps, does maximizing the idea of freedom in the anarchist thought lead to the paradox of the enslavement of its “believers” to that freedom?

Key words:
Anarchists, freedom, personality types, characters

Florian Znaniecki’s humanistic coefficient
in new contexts of autobiographical experience

This article deals with the continued relevance of the ideas and theories of Florian Znaniecki,
one of the most original Polish sociologists of the 20th century. We are particularly attentive to
the notion of the humanistic coefficient which, as one of the basic Znaniecki’s ideas, contains an
inspiring background for the analysis of the problem of multisensority of experience. We underline
the relevance of experience and action with references to pragmatism and technique – and source-
-related issues of the autobiographical method. Experience constitutes an immanent feature of the
humanistic coefficient. It should, hence, be analysed in the perspective of contemporary fields of
creative action that, enforce on subjects an appropriate character of competences and, its roots in
the developing spheres of multimedia experience. It is especially true about problems concerning
these spheres of reality, in which multisensority of the recording process of the experience allows
to bring casual and expert interpretations closer. The chance for this closeness stems from work
on interrelated methods of binding experience, and formal notions used both in theoretical and
practical actions.
Keywords: pragmatism, humanistic coefficient, experience, action, autobiographical method

The "Polish Peasant in Europe and America" is one of the foundational works of American and world sociology, famous for its innovative qualitative methodology. Its authors proposed new theoretical ideas, including a concept of social causality and a new theory of personality combining a biologistic concept of temperament with a culturalist concept of character. Interpreters of the book still disagree about the extent of each author’s actual contribution to the work and about its scientific status in light of modern sociological theories. This article claims that to understand the book one has to take into account the previous intellectual trajectories of both authors. As a theoretical dialogue between representatives of two contrary approaches, the work may serve as an alternative to the supposed theoretical “convergence” offered two decades later by Talcott Parsons.
It will be argued that the original views of both authors on human nature, individual action and the role of science were not just different, but contradictory. They shared neither philosophical assumptions nor perspectives on the social world. But if it were so, how could they succeed in writing a coherent work? It seems puzzling that Znaniecki could write: “Our divergent intellectual interests never conflicted”. Did they transform their previous concepts, synthesize them or rather give them up?
The purpose of the following paper is to reclaim the theoretical importance of the work by doing justice to the authors’ complex and partly divergent self-explications. This will be attempted through the establishment of the following theses:
(1) "The Polish Peasant" comprises themes and arguments from the previous works of Thomas and Znaniecki.
(2) The book may be interpreted as an attempt to reorder and reconcile their partly contradictory positions.
(3) In their dialogical cooperation, Thomas and Znaniecki used the strategy of the mutual adjustment of their original concepts by introducing them into more complex schemata and by avoiding biologistic and culturalistic reductionisms.
(4) In most general terms, "The Polish Peasant" depicts the genesis of social values by explaining simultaneously: a) the complex mechanisms of individual adaptations to new situations, and b) the internal readjustments of relatively stable value systems.
(5) The creative efforts of individuals, described in "The Polish Peasant" as prerequisites of effective adaptations, result from a reflexive self-observation which allows the inference of action principles from one’s own new practices.
(6) The resulting concept of socially induced creativity itself requires a sophisticated integration of Thomas’ adaptational approach with Znaniecki’s creativistic philosophy.

The article explores the development of qualitative sociology in Poland by presenting its main intellectual routes and some of the general features of Polish sociology. Romanticism and induction method are crucial elements for the development of this discipline in Poland and contribute to its uniqueness. The role of Florian ZNANIECKI in creating the Polish qualitative sociology is also underlined.

The aim of this article is to reread The Polish Peasant in Europe and America as
a representation of the fears and modernisation fantasies of its era. I analyse
the patterns of gendered family relations and ideals of femininity and
masculinity constructed by Thomas and Znaniecki within the framework
of rural–urban discourses. As I will show, in The Polish Peasant we find huge
contradictions between the liberal and conservative perspectives presented.
On the one hand, the authors introduce the concept of “organisation
– disorganisation – reorganisation,” which is supposed to be scientific and
thus non-ideological. On the other hand, the authors’ patterns of interpreting
empirical data show numerous gender bias and patriarchal schemes. As
a result, the authors create an opposition in which whatever is rural is the
cradle of authenticity, of naturalised national and gendered family values,
and whatever is urban is dangerous and demoralising due to escaping the
former strong rural social control. In The Polish Peasant the authors thereby
construct the “morally healthy” model of a national and patriarchal rural
community of families untouched by individualisation and women’s emancipation.
Such a model had a patriarchal division of gender roles within
a religiously devout, strong (meaning indissoluble), multi-generational family.
In The Polish Peasant we can find both a nostalgia – which was typical
of its era – for a “pre-modern,” rural, conservative civilisation, and worry
about the moral health of women in the urban world. However, it is an
ambivalent nostalgia accompanied by a conviction of the inevitability of
social change.

This article aims to highlight the influence of the work of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki on the perception of social reality by sociologists. I focus on the social practice of creating personal documents (memoirs, autobiographies, and letters) as a form of enacting individual agency and speaking their voice in the social space. I show the contribution of various social classes in this memorializing practice in Poland, reaching back to the 17th and 18th centuries. While doing so, I emphasize that a big part of society was practically muted in literary discourses. The voices of peasants and working-class were silenced as they had no access to the means which would enable them to speak and be represented in the discourse. Against this background, we can see how the “memoir competitions”—a very popular research practice being introduced in Poland by Znaniecki in 1921—have changed the power relations in the field of generating knowledge about social reality. The institution of...

The main of the article is to discuss the question concerning the applicability of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki and Młode pokolenie chłopów [The Young Generation of Peasants] (1938) by Józef Chałasiński, two crucial works in rural and general sociology, the year 2018 marking the anniversary of their original releases, in other areas of humanistic disciplines, with examples drawn from linguistic research. The author shortly characterises and justifies both historical and contemporary relationships between sociology and linguistics both on a general level and in their rural varieties. Cooperation between representatives of the given disciplines is possible on the ground of structuralism and, in fact, is being implemented in many joint research projects. Rural sociology has established itself as a subdiscipline of sociology and has developed its specific thematic and methodological autonomy within the major scope of the field. The existence of ‘rural’ linguistics is not so obvious, but there are certain phenomena and processes observed in rural conditions which justify the use of such a term, although it is not the officially accepted name of the subdiscipline which, in the present article, is defined as ‘linguistic (and sociolinguistic) research in rural area’ with constant references to dialectology.
Such methods as the personal documents method and the biographical method are already present in linguistics and sociolinguistics, although direct references to sociological works (both in general and specifically to both Thomas and Znaniecki’s and Chałasiński’s texts in detail) are rare. Still, some popular linguistic approaches, e.g. language biographies or the use of personal documents as a source of linguistic data, are very close to the ideas postulated by the precursors of rural sociology. There are also authors who have so far used Thomas and Znaniecki’s as well as Chałasiński’s theoretical achievements, and they consciously and directly refer to The Polish Peasant in Europe and America and The Young Generation of Peasants.

In this article, we deal with the specifics of the Polish-German borderland based on the example of Słubice and Frankfurt-Oder. Both Germany's position in Europe as well as Poland's geopolitical orientation after 1989 have had an impact on the shape of social relations in the borderland under question. In this article, we apply selected categories from the scope of social geography together with an analysis of sociological empirical results. We conclude that experiencing the space as well as the valorization of German urban and natural elements – both typical of the humanistic coefficient – coexist with the competences of the residents of Słubice: that of communication (using the German language) and interaction (having German friends). In divided towns, opinions about neighbours are hard to modify under the influence of the events taking place far away from the immediate neighbourhood. This has to do with " borderland effect " , i.e. more frequent and more intensive contacts with the neighbours from across the river. Frankfurters are characterized by the residents of Słubice as " punctual " , " complying with regulations " , " outgoing " and " sociable ". Liking (generally speaking) of Germans coexists here with such categories of experiencing, important for social geographers, as space, a piece of land, natural landscape, urban landscape, bridge, border, river's width, type of banks, distance between the developed land and the river itself, distance from the state border to particularly attractive sites (e.g. the Old Town, bars and restaurants), and the aesthetics of the surrounding.

The aim of the paper is to reflect on bell hooks’ autobiographies in the context of women’s process  of  self-empowerment.  Following  the  principle  of  the  humanistic coefficient (Znaniecki) and recognizing autobiography as a significant source in social research  (Thomas,  Znaniecki),  my  focus  is  to  understand,  explain  and  interpret  the process  of  shaping a woman’s subjectivity by analysing bell hooks’ autobiographical essays. I am interested in her autobiography as a life story of  a black  woman,  whose experiences have been shaped by racial segregation and desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s  in  the  USA and  for  whom  writing  autobiography  has  been  a  manifestation  of speaking with her own voice.

With the emergence of natural scientific disciplines, participants had to differentiate their scientific practices from those of older intellectual practices, including philosophy. They also had to justify the growing disciplinary division of labor. The two tasks became even thornier once human activity and its objective results became the object-matter of science. Eventually, scientists of human activity, recognizing that all human knowledge is a product of human activity, turned their analytical lenses on knowledge-producing activities and their objective results, including their own. Thus, the problem of a disciplinary science of science was born, along with the task of differentiating it from the philosophy of science and epistemology, as well as from the sociology of science and the sociology of knowledge, two subdisciplines of sociology.
Building on Florian Znaniecki’s vision for disciplinary cultural sciences and his theory of the cultural evolution of human knowledge(s), this dissertation offers a theory of the intellectual order of intellectual values in its connection to the non-intellectual arenas. Chapter 1 focuses on the problem of knowledge as a byproduct of commonsense and occupational practices. Chapter 2 analyzes the world of knowledge before the emergence of the exploratory sciences. And Chapter 3 theorizes the growing division of scientific-exploratory labor into branches, disciplines, and subdisciplines, arguing that the most recent developments in the intellectual order of intellectual values are (a) the emergence of disciplinary exploratory-scientific practices, rooted in their new exploratory scientific standards—normative, methodological, and purposive—that differentiate exploratory-scientific practices from all other intellectual practices; (b) the emergence of disciplinary cultural-scientific practices that, together, give rise the emergence of the cultural branch of exploratory science, differentiated from the natural branch of science; and (c) the emergence of logology as a cultural scientific discipline dedicated to the scientific exploration for new intellectual (logological) facts and theories bearing on all intellectual (logological) facts, increasingly differentiated from the philosophy of science and sociology of science and knowledge.

The article concerns Florian’s Znaniecki creativeness as a sociological issue. It treats biography and early works of the polish sociologist as an example of autodidactic and self-consciousness success. I mention three consecutive stages of development of creative process: Znaniecki’s poetry, his unconditional decision of unparalleled devotion into pure intellectual work and the organization of socio-intellectual life of his interaction circles in Warsaw in 1910-14.

This article deals with the continued relevance of the ideas and theories of Florian Znaniecki, one of the most original Polish sociologists of the 20th century. We are particularly attentive to the notion of the humanistic coefficient which, as one of the basic Znaniecki’s ideas, contains an inspiring background for the analysis of the problem of multisensority of experience. We underline the relevance of experience and action with references to pragmatism and technique – and source- -related issues of the autobiographical method. Experience constitutes an immanent feature of the humanistic coefficient. It should, hence, be analysed in the perspective of contemporary fields of creative action that, enforce on subjects an appropriate character of competences and, its roots in the developing spheres of multimedia experience. It is especially true about problems concerning these spheres of reality, in which multisensority of the recording process of the experience allows to bring casu...

This text critiques a classic sociological text, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. The value of the work, which consists in the successful combination of elements from several intellectual traditions, is presented in connection with the biographical and historical background of one of the authors, Florian Znaniecki. In conclusion, the author makes a number of remarks concerning the special situation of migrants in global intellectual networks.

Celem artykułu jest wywołanie refleksji nad przesłaniem Marii Dudzikowej
o uważnym studiowaniu literatury przez młodych badaczy. Przedmiotem analiz są wybrane teksty Floriana Znanieckiego- jednego z wielu autorów „lektur znaczących”,
do których sięgania zachęcała Pani Profesor. Kierunek rozważań wyznaczają powiązania
pomiędzy zagadnieniami poruszanymi w „Socjologii wychowania” a obszarami
problemowymi, którymi zajmowała się M. Dudzikowa.