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Aleksander Smolar - Working at the History Centre of European Sociology (43/201)

156 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 3:37 · Indexed 24 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: Suddenly, I found myself in an extraordinary situation because this wasn’t an assistant lecturer’s wage, this was a professor’s salary. I had left Poland as an assistant lecturer, in France I had turned up on Raymond Aron’s doorstep and he, in his magnanimity, because he liked me and maybe, too, because I had been recommended by his two assistant lecturers – Hassner, like Casanova had been his assistants. In addition, he’d loved Hassner who was exceptionally intelligent – is an exceptionally intelligent person. So that was how I found myself in the Centre – it was called the History Centre of European Sociology, an absurd name but that’s not important; there were historical reasons for this – where I attended seminars and where there was a group of exceptional people. To be honest, I don’t know whether there was such a concentration of grey cells anywhere else in Europe. There were many famous names there of people who regularly attended Aron’s seminars. There were people there, well known in Poland, too, a very conservative expert in history, the philosopher of history, religion, Alain de Benoist, the renowned sociologist, Jean Baechler, the historian Annie Kriegel and Pierre Hassner. Of the younger generation there was Pierre Manent who today is an outstanding conservative philosopher, a Christian philosopher, highly respected. But it was only the right-wing – Aron had been cast out by the left-wingers after ’68 because he had a very negative view of that time, a bit hysterical, but he saw it in a somewhat apocalyptic light. So you could say that this had influenced the way he had espoused a more conservative sort of opposition, liberal conservative, although he talked to me – he liked talking to me very much – and he said that I was left of the Aronists, meaning that he was the furthest to the left of his followers. This may have been true because the general atmosphere was very conservative, but you have to remember that this was still France where the Communist Party plays a very big role and Marxism is, so to speak, in the air in discourses, universities, everywhere on a daily basis, so that’s something to be aware of. So I mainly work, write, concern myself with well, our countries – again, when I spoke about the lines of orientation, those attempts at joining my political and intellectual passions together, this meant that I concerned myself with the world that was my world. Intellectually, I’d always been involved with the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe irrespective of whether the project was on economics or sociology or purely political. It was always about these countries although from time-to-time I gave lectures in, among other places, Collège de France, in the course of Aron’s lectures. The number of my international contacts is growing and I lead a very intense life regarding conferences. I’m beginning to participate in a great many intellectual conferences in the United States, in Italy and in Germany.

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