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"This book explores the public debates among scholars that took place in Early Cold War Poland. The author challenges the traditional narrative on the 'Sovietisation' of Central and Eastern European countries and proposes to see this process not as a spread of Marxist ideology or a Soviet institutional model, but as an attempt to force scholars to rapidly adopt new academic and civic virtues. This book argues that this project failed to succeed in Poland and shows how the struggle against these new virtues united both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. While covering the arc of Polish scholarly debates, the author invites the reader to go beyond Poland and to use 'virtues' as a framework for reflections on both the foundations of scholarly practice and the 'nature' of authoritarian regimes with their ambition to teach scholars how to be 'virtuous.'"--

This article deals with the public debates on the genealogy of Polish social sciences after the Second World War. The author shows how the changes in political conditions in the period between the end of the war (1945) and the 'Stalinisation' of Polish science at the First Congress of Polish Science (1951) influenced the 'limits of the permissible' in public discussions about the scientific identity of sociology. The article describes the stages in the development of public discourse on the genealogy of the social sciences and thematises the increasing influence of the political agenda on the public practices of academics. When, immediately after the war, continuity with inter-war tradition, and the limited character of the Marxist approach, were particularly emphasised in the public discourse on the genealogy of social sciences, the beginning of the 'Stalinisation' of public space in 1948 forced the scholars to put emphasis on the political role of sociology, which, according to them, belonged to the 'progressive camp' together with Marxism. The closing of the sociological departments, and a journal, between 1950 and 1951 started a new stage of the debates within the preparatory meetings for the scientific congress. At this congress, the task of the social scientists was to construct, together with philosophers, a 'progressive scientific tradition' in Poland. For the Polish social scientists, the congress was a task to write a 'mathematical equation' with a known result and several mandatory elements such as 'the progressive national tradition,' 'Marxism-Leninism,' and 'six-year plan.' However, even under strong political pressure, the participants in the discussions did not come to a compromise concerning the progressive tradition of the Polish social sciences, and did not achieve the necessary 'unity.'