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Aleksander Smolar - Being part of the French academic world (50/201)

181 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 1:26 · Indexed 1 November 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: After that, we did more and more things and thanks to us being in an academic environment we had a great number of contacts. Our contacts were the leading intellectuals and in my case, I had easy access to everyone in politics. What I mean is that I had open access to the highest levels of French politics and was involved with all kinds of French initiatives. I was very involved with life in France then, more so than I am today. I was on the editorial boards of two journals, the deuxième gauche, the second left, which formed around Michel Rocard so it was an anti-communist left wing. And then there was the pro-market, you could say, the liberal left. I was in 'l’Alternative', a publication about the countries in our bloc published by [François] Maspero. I was also on the editorial board for 20 years, having only just left, of a Catholic intellectual publication called 'Esprit'. It was an exceptional group of people and to be honest, apart from the Trotskyists, only they were interested in our countries at that time. I was also very involved in intellectual affairs and, like I said, in issues on a  global scale, meaning I went to many conferences, met and got to know many people – I’ll tell you shortly about once such event.

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