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Aleksander Smolar - My twofold passions: knowledge and politics (22/201)

213 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 3:00 · Indexed 20 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: I had a taste of freedom for a year while I was at the polytechnic where I studied communication – I soon left. These days, it would probably be called something like electronics. I was there with our mutual friend, Marcel Łoziński – we were there together and spent a year there, he finished his degree, God knows what for, whereas I was there for a year. I made a quick escape to university where I studied economics and then sociology. That was the world of my passionate interests. I mean, I always had twofold interests. Going back to the pivotal points in my life, one such point which defined who I was and what I did was that I always had two passions. There was a passion for knowledge, you could call it broadly social sciences, by which I mean economics, sociology, political science, obviously, philosophy, history in so far as it was connected with politics. Politics interested me. It has been my passion throughout my life. Intellectual as well as practical, politics interested me, and as far as this was possible within the confines of the PPR, I was involved in it. And those two sides which later were always there, you could say that one worked against the other. What I mean is that my involvement with politics limited my options for intellectual enrichment as well as for having a strong intellectual presence. On the other hand, my academic work obviously limited my political engagement. This was obvious and it later became apparent. As for my politcal engagement while I was still a student, you could say that initially I followed a revisionist current while I was still very young – this was still allowed at least at the university, University of Warsaw, where there was a pretty liberal atmosphere. I mean there was a kind of humanist interpretation of Marxism, and of course there were those atrocities which I knew about thanks to my father. I’d read that so-called report by Khrushchev for the 20th rally of the KPZR, in ’56. I knew a lot very quickly.

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