The author of this essay deals with the specificity of sociology in Poland, reaching for the book of Antoni Sułek A Mirror on the High Road. Chapters from the History of Social Research in Poland (2019). Chapters of this book taken as a set constitute a review of the key issues that Polish sociologists strived to tackle in the 20th century. For approximately half of the book (6 chapters) Sułek focuses on issues of Polish sociology from the mid-1950s to the turn of the 1990s: the first is the change of theoretical and methodological paradigms in Polish sociology in the second half of the 20th century; the second is the successes of Polish sociology, but also its weaknesses—the author devoted much space to the theoretical limitations that prevented sociologists from predicting the formation of Solidarity in 1980. The third topic is the historical analysis of surveys conducted in the last decade of communism—their reliability as well as social and political functions. Finally, Sułek’s vision of socially-involved sociology appears. The strength of such sociology lies in its methodology, with which specific phenomena can be correctly defined, impartially analysed, and systematically investigated. And this in turn enables evidence-based debate and policy.
Recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of research papers and books seeking to assess threats of electoral victories of anti-establishment politicians and political parties, described as authoritarian populists. This essay focuses on three books directly addressing the origins and threats of authoritarian populism to democracy. It consists of six sections and the conclusion. The first section presents findings (Norris and Inglehart) based on surveys of values of voters of various age cohorts concluding that authoritarian populism is a temporary backlash provoked by the post-materialist perspective. The second section examines the contention, spelled out in Levitsky and Ziblatt, that increase in openness of American political system produced, unintentionally, a degradation of the American political system. The third section continues brief presentations focusing on to the causes and implications of “illiberal democracy,” and “undemocratic liberalism” (Mounk). The fourth section examines developments in the quality of democracy in the world showing that despite the decline in Democracy Indices, overall there was no slide towards non-democratic forms of government in 2006–2019. The next two sections deal with dimensions missing in reviewed books; the notion of nation-state, international environment, civic culture and, in particular, dangers of radical egalitarianism to democracy. The last section concludes with regrets that the authors ignored rich literature on fragility of democracy and failed to incorporate in their analyses deeper structural factors eroding democracy: by the same token, return to the pre-populist shock trajectory is unlikely to assure survival of liberal democracy.
The article presents Charles Taylor’s critical philosophy of language and it reviews his recent book on the human linguistic capacity. Critical philosophy of language is understood here as a broad (philosophical, social and political) perspective on language characterized by multifaceted concern with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in language use. The paper discusses Taylor’s interest in language and philosophy of language, and focuses on his seminal distinction between the ‘designative-instrumental’ and ‘constitutive-expressive’ theories of language. In the former theory language is understood within the confi nes of Cartesian representational epistemology, whereas in the latter language constitutes meaning and shapes human experience (one of the features important for defi ning the critical approach to philosophy of language).