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This article investigates the rise of political antisemitism during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. Extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals the role antisemitism played as a political device assisting the construction of new political identities and their dissemination through political mobilization. National Democracy and their labor branch, the National Workers Union, took the nation as the basic form of affiliation. The forging of such national unity, however, was difficult to engender among the workers owing to unique historical circumstances, the experience of exploitation, and longstanding socialist agitation. This process was aided, however, by the reference to a strong negative figure of the Other. When "nationalism began to hate," antisemitism appeared to be an extremely effective mobilizing device, and the Jews started to act as a negative, constitutive point of reference for the construction of national unity among the Poles. The analysis of the mobilization process and focus on discourse as a main factor in shaping political identities demonstrates that National Democratic antisemitism was neither an automatic activation of already present popular anti-Jewish sentiments due to the rise of mass politics nor a sheer creation of nationalist ideologues. It was, rather, the logic of discourse that ushered in a need for a negatively evaluated outsider, Jews being easily invested in this place due to a particular sociodemographic conjuncture and older judeophobic tendencies.

Artykuł rozważa zmianę w endeckim dyskursie politycznym w okresie rewolucji 1905–1907. Podejmuję w nim analizę zmiany stosunku do "mas". Wizję modernizacji mas traktuję jako specyficzną formę dyskursu nowoczesności – reakcję na niezdeterminowanie, nieadekwatność politycznych instytucji i języków i gwałtowne rozszerzenie realnego uczestnictwa politycznego. Argumentuję, że określona koniunktura czy splot zdarzeń, zarówno z dziedziny myślenia politycznego, jak i procesów społecznych, wytworzyła specyficzną sytuację kryzysu, pewien moment polityczny. Określona reakcja na ten moment – w tym przypadku organicystyczny, hierarchiczny dyskurs wspólnoty i wizja zdyscyplinowanych mas pod endecką kontrolą, zadecydowała o kształcie całości endeckiego myślenia politycznego. Ów efekt ma swoje długofalowe konsekwencje i określa późniejszy kształt ideowy formacji endeckiej. ; The article examines a change in Polish National Democratic (Nationalist) political discourse accompanying the 1905 Revolution. In particular, I scrutinize the change in the conceptualization of "the masses". I consider a particular vision of the modernization of the masses as a form of discourse of modernity. Thus, I see it as a reaction to the indeterminacy of the social inadequacy of existing political institutions and discourses and the rapid widening of actual political participation. I argue that specific conjuncture between lineages of political thinking and social processes created a tipping point: a political moment or crisis. A particular answer for this moment – in this case an organic, hierarchic discourse of community and the envisioned whole of disciplined masses under the nationalistic control – defined the forthcoming shape of the National Democratic program. This resulted in long lasting consequences and defined the overall National Democratic project.

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.

Tekst podejmuje problem granic aplikowalności koncepcji społecznych światów zaproponowanej przez Anselma Straussa. Posługując się swoistym eksperymentem intelektualnym – próbą zastosowania tej koncepcji do opisu krańcowego przypadku, jakim są społeczności konsensualnych sadomasochistów – pokazuje niemożliwe do ujęcia w ramach tej teorii, a kluczowe dla opisu tej grupy, elementy. Specyficzny sposób organizacji podmiotowego doświadczenia i podzielana "definicja sytuacji" w "mocnym" sensie (interpretacja stosowanej przemocy seksualnej) to czynniki, których nie można ująć odwołując się do podmiotowej samoświadomości uczestników interakcji. Cała tradycja interakcjonizmu symbolicznego zaś implicytnie zakłada taki, samoświadomy, kartezjański podmiot wyrażający się głównie w sferze werbalnej. Prześledzenie zmian w pojmowaniu podmiotu w tradycji pragmatyczno-interakcjonistycznej, w której zakorzeniona jest teoria Straussa, pozwala ukazać jej potencjalne ograniczenia. Zmiany w ujmowaniu podmiotu w całości nauk humanistycznych i społecznych każą również bardziej świadomie spojrzeć na stosowanie koncepcji społecznych światów.

AbstractThis article explores the political trajectories of the early twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland in the context of the "global parliamentary moment," when the constitutional script of revolution competed with the more daring script of social revolution. We scrutinize contrastive political choices of socialist parties in these two western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Finland and Poland emerged as independent parliamentary states in 1917–1918 but under manifestly different circumstances. The Finnish socialist party had enjoyed a stable foothold in the formally democratic but practically impotent national parliament since 1907, whereas the Polish socialists boycotted the Russian Duma and envisioned a democratic legislature as a guaranty of a Poland with true people's power. The Finnish socialists later abandoned parliamentarism in favor of an armed revolution, in 1918, whereas most of their Polish counterparts used the parliamentary ideal of popular sovereignty to restrain the revolutionary upsurge. We argue that the socialist understandings of parliamentarism and revolution were of crucial importance at this juncture. We draw from a broad corpora of political press reports, handwritten newspapers, and leaflets to show how the diachronic sequence of events and synchronic power relations inside the Russian Empire made certain stances toward parliamentarism and revolution more likely at different points in time.

This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about the impact of the uprising and warfare on revamping the concept of representation. A representative, parliamentary, but not yet democratic order emerged under the conditions of reduced sovereignty. We demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in times of war ushered in non-descriptive and non-imperative representation and how the struggle for legitimacy helped introduce the idea of the government's responsibility to the nation. Although the broadening of citizenship beyond the nobles was still debated only concerning possible land reform, the push and pull of the frontline situation and transnational diffusion and learning spurred on fundamental changes. The 1831 Sejm was a threshold for modern parliamentarism in Poland, bringing its earlier endogenous developments in line with European drift towards representative government.

"The worst thing one can do with words," George Orwell once wrote, "is to surrender to them." One must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way," to use language for "expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought," he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements "let the meaning to choose the words" and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surrendered to words when imagining it. Medieval heretics, French revolutionaries, and various socialist movements on the fringes of the Russian Empire one hundred yearslater, as well as groups like nationalist urban reformers, Muslim modernizers, and democratic antisuffragists–all had to face fossilized concepts that they attempted to question and modify, actively reappropriating them to forge new configurations. They also inherited the existing language and other sign systems, which cannot be modified at will without the risk of losing the capacity to communicate. To paraphrase Karl Marx's nutshell definition of historical agency, people make use of their concepts but they do not do so as they please; they do not do so under self-selected circumstances but, rather, under the already-existing circumstances given and transmitted in language and social relations.

"The worst thing one can do with words," George Orwell once wrote, "is to surrender to them." One must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way," to use language for "expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought," he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements "let the meaning to choose the words" and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surrendered to words when imagining it. Medieval heretics, French revolutionaries, and various socialist movements on the fringes of the Russian Empire one hundred yearslater, as well as groups like nationalist urban reformers, Muslim modernizers, and democratic antisuffragists–all had to face fossilized concepts that they attempted to question and modify, actively reappropriating them to forge new configurations. They also inherited the existing language and other sign systems, which cannot be modified at will without the risk of losing the capacity to communicate. To paraphrase Karl Marx's nutshell definition of historical agency, people make use of their concepts but they do not do so as they please; they do not do so under self-selected circumstances but, rather, under the already-existing circumstances given and transmitted in language and social relations. ; "The worst thing one can do with words," George Orwell once wrote, "is to surrender to them." One must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way," to use language for "expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought," he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements "let the meaning to choose the words" and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surrendered to words when imagining it. Medieval heretics, French revolutionaries, and various socialist movements on the fringes of the Russian Empire one hundred yearslater, as well as groups like nationalist urban reformers, Muslim modernizers, and democratic antisuffragists–all had to face fossilized concepts that they attempted to question and modify, actively reappropriating them to forge new configurations. They also inherited the existing language and other sign systems, which cannot be modified at will without the risk of losing the capacity to communicate. To paraphrase Karl Marx's nutshell definition of historical agency, people make use of their concepts but they do not do so as they please; they do not do so under self-selected circumstances but, rather, under the already-existing circumstances given and transmitted in language and social relations.