The Polish Intelligentsia: The Emergence and Transformation of the Social Group and its World View

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the discussion on the origins of the Polish intelligentsia and to describe the process of its development from the Enlightenment until the Second World War. The author examinesthe emergence of the educated bourgeoisie in the 18th century and proceeds to consider the impact of the partitions. The Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815) and the constitutional Polish Kingdom with the Russian Tsar as King of Poland (1815–1831), provided the Polish intelligentsia withofficial jobs and permitted it to develop as a stratum of state servants. After the lost Uprising of 1830/1831, thousands of educated people had to emigrate. They developed a new ideology, a branch of European romanticism thatextolled sacrifice and the fight for freedom and independence. As opposed to it,another ideology of gradual “organic work” appeared in the 1840s in Prussian Poland; the rivalry of these two approaches would from that moment become one of the defining features of Polish intellectual life.
The paper analyzes the impact of the policies pursued by the partitioning powers: the Russification of the Polish Kingdom and the parallel Germanization of the Prussian Poland closed job opportunities in the state sector for the Polish intelligentsia and alienated it even further from the state. In the Austrian partition (Galicia), in turn, the Polish intelligentsia could pursue the national culture and find jobs in the state service, but due to economic reasons it never assumed the role of “Bildungsbürgertum”.
In the conclusion the author examines the impact of the beginning of mass politics and the regaining of independence by Poland in 1918 on the functions, conflicts and views of the Polish intelligentsia.