Homo sovieticus and the Neoliberal Legacy of Polish Dissent

End to the Psychology of Slavery?

For Aleksandr Zinov′ev, homo sovieticus was the living ridicule of the Communist ambition to create a New Man. Actually existing Soviet men and women were lacking in all officially promoted virtues. They were morally corrupt, publicly slavish, and passive, not to mention their predatory attitude toward common or socialized property. In other words, what Hirschman described as the thesis of the perverse effect seems to render quite well the rhetorical thrust of Zinov′ev’s critique of actually existing Communism. However, there is an important caveat. Edmund Burke—whose writings epitomize that thesis according to Hirschman—recognized the perverse effect in the negative, unintended consequences of Enlightened attempts to reform traditional institutions and habits that, according to Burke, were good as they were: they preserved the wisdom of the past generations and possessed an intrinsic capacity for improvement. Homo sovieticus was likewise a perversion of progressive designs, but Eastern Europe was no Great Britain, and the critical intellectuals of the Soviet era found it rather debatable whether there was anything worth preserving in the backward political culture and institutions of the region preceding the Communist takeover. In that doubt they were following in the footsteps of the Westernizer intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, and that legacy created a common intellectual context for Polish and Soviet critiques of homo sovieticus despite very different societal contexts of the 1980s. ¹⁹ That longer ancestry made uncivility persisting in the minds and habits appear as an immutable condition, the reform of which would be futile.

Adam Michnik was among the dissident writers who revisited this conundrum. He linked the present and the past of uncivility by using the umbrella term of “psychology of captivity” (or sometimes “slavery”). This theme emerged in his historical essays first. In “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” his 1973 debut in the Paris émigré periodical Kultura, Michnik strongly identified with Józef Piłsudski’s contempt for attitudes of accommodation to unfreedom. “It is not patriotic and political concerns but my own concerns, my own good that inspire me to fight. This will rescue me from sinking into the anonymous, shapeless mass of the depraved, captive, and obedient.” ²⁰ Judging from his later activities, Michnik also identified with Piłsudski’s imperative to educate society toward self-determination, through unlicensed books, journals, lectures, and action. “Acquiescence to servitude, he told us, must never be permitted. We are not allowed to remain silent when our fundamental values are being violated. To give up those imponderables is to give up cultural identity, to consent to cultural annihilation.” ²¹

In that essay, Michnik was clearly critical of Piłsudski’s role in destroying democracy in interwar Poland, but he did not inquire how contempt for the psychology of slavery and the later autocratic turn were connected. The answer would come in another essay, “Conversation in the Citadel,” written in 1982 from an internment prison during martial law. While, a decade before, Michnik had contrasted Piłsudski’s attitude with that of Roman Dmowski, the foundational figure of the modern Polish Right, now he searched for commonalities in their shared condition.

Dmowski and Piłsudski were full of contempt for the psychology of slavery, the product of tsarist rule. This was gradually transformed into contempt for those people who still suffered this psychology. Yet weren’t these the same people whom the leaders wanted to educate toward self-determination? Dangerous traits were present in the political programs of that day; traits in which from today’s perspective it is easy to see the mark of pretotalitarianism. ²²

What creates the breeding ground for totalitarianism in this case is not quite populism but, on the contrary, mistrust in the people and their civic capacities that persists beyond the moment of independence and undermines free institutions.

For Michnik, initially, the antidote for the totalitarian temptation was the cooperative anarchism of Edward Abramowski, Piłsudski’s contemporary, who despised socialist politics driven by activist minorities, be they professional revolutionaries or social-democratic politicians aiming at capturing state power, since that could only yield a new form of bureaucratic tyranny. Cooperativism consisted instead of building autonomous institutions that opened space for practicing new forms of civility, built on the values of solidarity, brotherhood, and social justice. The cooperative was Michnik’s blueprint for the anti-totalitarian left-wing politics that informed his formulation of the “new evolutionism.” In this deep sense, new evolutionism and homo sovieticus—a figure of contempt for the captive mentality—were conceptually incompatible. As Jacques Rupnik already noted in the 1980s, central European dissidents invoked that figure less than their Soviet counterparts. ²³ They would turn the edge of their critique against complicity, rather than mentality—that is, accommodative choices people made (and could one day not make), and not residues of uncivility persisting in minds and habits. Critique of the political culture of complicity contained an element of hope, since—to use Václav Havel’s iconic formulation—the greengrocer was at the same time the dissident “fifth column,” and the dissidents were the “vocal tip” expressing the aspirations of the iceberg mass of citizens who strove for the independent life of society under the radar of party functionaries.

The rise of Solidarity in August 1980 seemed to testify to the pedagogic effectiveness of new evolutionism. In Solidarity’s self-limited revolution, Michnik saw a rebirth of civil society, the maturation of which consisted precisely in the ability to keep its civic aspirations at bay.

The essence of the spontaneously growing Independent and Self-governing Labor Union Solidarity lay in the restoration of social ties, self-organization aimed at guaranteeing the defense of labor, civil, and national rights. For the first time in the history of communist rule in Poland “civil society” was being restored, and it was reaching a compromise with the state. ²⁴

Solidarity seemed to overcome the deep, historical inheritance of the psychology of captivity, including the most recent exposure to the Communist political culture of uncivility.

Many contemporary observers recognized that the union’s programmatic statements, instead of being a coherent ideological blueprint, combined disparate and sometimes dissonant elements from different political traditions. It was a movement, as Michnik wrote at the time, that

combines demands for market reform with the ethos of egalitarianism; that uses the language of national solidarity to formulate the traditionally leftist idea of social self-government; that is a cross between contradictory elements and a mélange of matter; that combines the cult of its leader with a democracy that reaches pathological proportions; and that joins an astounding wisdom with a rare naiveté. ²⁵

That was interpreted more as a strength than a weakness in a post-totalitarian era that had lost faith in totalizing schemes to improve the human condition. Inconsistency testified to a vivid culture of pluralism.

In defiance of the advocates of the jeopardy thesis, Solidarity’s 1981 Action Program declared “there is no bread without freedom.” The civil, political, and social entitlements of citizenship must come together, and if one is lost, so are all. Nobody doubted at the time that the mighty union would defend the social rights the workers had acquired. The novelty was that it saw that welfare demands were inseparable from the cause of civic rights and political self-determination. In Hirschman’s terms, Solidarity was an explosion of the “synergy illusion” at the moment when, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the progressive consensus about the ability to harmonize civic, political, and social aspects of citizenship was losing ground—the fracture that prompted him to write The Rhetoric of Reaction. This is why, as Timothy Garton Ash acutely observed, support for Solidarity in the West was accompanied by embarrassment across the political spectrum. The political fracture inside Western societies runs so deep, Garton Ash observed, that accusations of clericalism, nationalism, egalitarian syndicalism, indifference to the cause of disarmament, or danger to détente were all excuses that concealed the abhorrence of Reaganites and progressives in the United States, or Christian Democrats and Eurocommunists in Italy, toward the perspective of acting in the same camp. ²⁶ Yet for Garton Ash, the synergy illusion was precisely what made the Polish Revolution glorious; namely, it inspired hope (for the West as well as for the East) that the Arendtian essence of political liberty, the human capacity for unexpected new beginnings, was not altogether lost. ²⁷

The immediate effect of the imposition of martial law and the descent of Solidarity supporters at liberty into the underground was to strengthen that image. Writing about the resistance from the Białołęka prison in 1982, Michnik returned to the theme of the psychology of captivity, but with another interesting twist: in addition to obedience—the deficit of civility—the notion began to denote a surplus of uncivility, as in anomic instances of protest. Whether showing up to sham elections or burning the party committee, the rebellious slave remained a slave. Unused to practicing liberty, the slave in rebellion could only act out his anger and appetite for revenge, while yearning for a better tsar. However, Michnik believed, the sixteen months of Solidarity’s “Carnival of Freedom” put an end to this psychology in Poland:

I believe that the August 1980 workers’ revolt and the activities of Solidarity have terminated this psychology. In those fifteen months, people had a taste of freedom; they forged their solidarity and discovered their strength; they again felt themselves to be a civic and national community. I do not want to idealize Solidarity, its actions, or its activists. I know about the demagogy and baseness, residual effects of the captive psychology that were present in it. But these are inevitable aspects of every mass movement and the unavoidable heritage of years of slavery. ²⁸

Indeed, Michnik and other members of KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników, Workers’ Defense Committee) had first-hand experience of that damnosa hereditas. KOR dissidents were sidelined inside the union and became targets for conspiracy theories spread by the movement’s populist sector, always including allusions to revisionist-Communist origins and sometimes with anti-semitic overtones—an obsession that ended in controversy during Solidarity’s First National Congress, when a motion thanking KOR for its support of workers during the June 1976 strikes was contested. In one publicized instance, Michnik used his personal authority as an “anti-socialist element” to contain an angry mob from burning a militia post in Otwock near Warsaw. ²⁹ The averted violence was a reminder that, in Poland, the alternative to social self-organization was riot as likely as apathy, the insight underlying Jacek Kuroń’s famous dictum “Don’t burn down Committees; found your own.” ³⁰ Yet, in the course of the imposition of martial law, a major tragedy was avoided, and Michnik preferred to believe that the civic breakthrough gained with Solidarity was irreversible. On the eve of the Round Table talks in 1989, he would reconsider that opinion.

The Neoliberal Critique of Solidarity’s Legacy

There was a hopeful message for progressives that transpired from Hirschman’s argument: the counterthrust against social rights would subside, just like the civic and political entitlements of citizenship emerged resilient from the reactionary waves of the past. Now we know that the erosion of the synergy illusion at the core of the progressive consensus of the postwar decades has been more profound than Hirschman expected. Dissent in Poland has been far from immune to that historic counterthrust. If the initial readings of the legacy of Solidarity aroused the synergy illusion and the initial understanding of the self-limited revolution was that of a surplus of civic aspirations that had to be kept at bay due to Poland’s geopolitical situation, the neoliberal critique would contest that legacy along the lines of the jeopardy thesis, and homo sovieticus would be the protagonist of that turn.

The initial thrust of the neoliberal critique came from outside the movement, from eminent émigrés such as the intellectual historian Andrzej Walicki and from the Kraków conservative circle of Christian liberals led by Mirosław Dzielski. Both turned the topos of homo sovieticus against the legacy of Solidarity and presented an alternative vision of transition from Communism, taking inspiration from Pinochet’s Chile, founded on crushing a broad popular front and resting on the double pillar of political dictatorship and economic neoliberalization.

In place of the synergy illusion, the crucial distinction that the late-socialist neoliberals brought into the debate on Solidarity’s legacy was the distinction between liberalism and democracy that informed their jeopardy narrative of transition from Communism. This distinction was largely derived from Hayek’s writings, and for thinkers such as the Christian liberal Mirosław Dzielski, it was the cornerstone of their political vision. That Solidarity put democratization first was not only unrealistic, since it posed an existential threat to the party, but it was also founded on a conceptual mistake, Dzielski argued—that of identifying liberty and democracy, whereas a democratic totalitarianism was just as possible as a human rights–observant dictatorship. Most of all, the history of the Western civilization had shown that liberty was unthinkable outside a market society, which implied not only a right to private property but also civility, the work ethic, a set of cultural dispositions toward self-reliance, and thrift: the virtues of capitalist society that exposure to the Communist experiment had eradicated. Dzielski believed that, despite its origins, the regime in Poland was evolving in the direction of right-wing authoritarianism, and the task of the liberals was to direct the cynical ruling class toward building a healthy market society based on Christian ethics that would eventually turn into a democracy in a distant future. Solidarity, betting on a premature democratization, was obstructing these efforts. Dzielski explained:

Communism brings about a decay into barbarism. To revive civility, the return of democracy is not enough, contrary to what the supporters of the primacy of political freedoms among the Polish anti-Communists believe. I doubt whether in our situation democracy would consolidate. In contrast, a temporary, even long-lasting forsaking of democracy in the name of compromise with the interests of the police and the military might lead, in case of the institution of economic liberties, to a gradual betterment of social customs, which would prepare society as a whole for future freedom, including in politics. ³¹

Andrzej Walicki would combine the neoliberal argument about the jeopardy that Solidarity posed to the post-totalitarian evolution of Communist dictatorship toward market authoritarianism with a perversity argument. Solidarity was not only obstructing the political direction desired by the neoliberals. While the state was evolving away from totalitarianism, in Solidarity’s anti-totalitarian crusade, political radicalism, and moral terrorism against its own dissidents (such as Walicki himself), it was metamorphosing into its own opposite, namely an instance of democratic totalitarianism:

Solidarity must be seen as a socialist mass movement, one striving for at least a share of political power, but not one seeking to limit political power in the name of individual freedom. It is a movement aiming not so much at the separation of economics from politics, but rather the democratization of politicoeconomic decision-making. It is a democratic movement, but it can hardly be called liberal, because it opposes authoritarian bureaucratic collectivism not in the name of individualistic values, but in the name of democratic collectivism of the masses. It wants to divide political power, but it is not sufficiently aware of the desirability of limiting the scope of all political power, including democracy. In this sense we can even say that the political thinking of the leaders of Solidarity (not to mention its ordinary members) is contaminated to some extent by the spirit of socialist totalitarianism—in spite of their verbal condemnations of all kinds of totalitarian power. ³²

Walicki’s and Dzielski’s assault on the legacy of Solidarity was intellectually most consistent, but given its intransigence, it had little effect on the movement’s loyalists. Also, as a self-professed clerk, Walicki kept a distance from the political struggles of the day, and Dzielski’s circle went into disarray after its leader was diagnosed with cancer in January 1989, while on a scholarship in the United States, dying later that year. It would be the Gdańsk liberals who would bring the neoliberal critique inside the bastion of Solidarity on the Polish coast.

The Gdańsk liberals, led by Donald Tusk, Janusz Lewandowski, and Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, recruited mostly from the ranks of the independent student association that was disbanded after the declaration of martial law and from the group of economic advisors to the union, who were shaping Solidarity’s economic policy before martial law. Unlike the Kraków circle, they remained loyal to Solidarity, rejecting the core premise of Dzielski’s thinking that the regime had an internal capacity for de-totalization. Solidarity remained the only political force able to exert pressure on the regime in that direction. However, the Gdańsk circle grew to think that it should use this pressure to pursue an agenda that was quite different to the one inscribed in its action program.

As far as we can trust Donald Tusk’s recollection, their neoliberal turn was paradoxically an instance of killing the father figure typical of the 1968 generation. They came of age on the Polish coast under the dual spell of the global youth protest culture and the local workers’ massacre of 1970 that made them adopt left radicalism and plunge headlong into the Carnival of Freedom. Interest in liberalism would come only after martial law, from the reckoning with the union’s debacle. Paradoxically, the contemporary neoliberal revival in the West was a useful vehicle for a ’68-style radical rupture. It was disruptive of the postwar order, and to be an adopter of that disruptive trend in the East had its allure. It also mattered that liberalism was largely absent from the range of Polish political traditions that had inspired the dissident leadership and seemingly led it astray. Solidarity, wrote Donald Tusk in the key programmatic article of the Gdańsk liberals in 1987, marked the end, rather than the beginning of an era:

Solidarity grew out of a specific social circumstance and was the heir of a specific history. It was the highest achievement of the Poles, while at the same time reflecting their political culture and social consciousness. The union was created, and later led, by elites that were rooted in Communism, entangled in a web of anachronistic ideas and categories, often contradictory, and thus making it impossible to cut the socialist-etatist loop.[. . .] It was even worse at the bottom. ³³

Etatism, he came to believe, was the source of the civilizational collapse of Poland, and the reform that Poland needed was to embrace the minimalist state and an economy based on private property and free-market competition. As Tusk saw it, “ideas connected with the ‘third way,’ the ‘non-bourgeois civil society,’ ‘socialism with a human face,’ and so on, are a utopia and a political fiction, regardless of their source. The idea of civil society in the traditional meaning of this term (the only one that was validated) is immanently related to economic freedoms.” ³⁴ Accordingly, Poland’s problem was not only a problem of the omnipotence of the socialist state but also a problem of uncivility. The preeminent task of the opposition was to transform the egalitarian dispositions of society and change its approval of the state’s overprotectiveness.

From that perspective, the return to the status quo ante bellum, the restoration of the politics of social accords between the powerful union and the state, was a dead end. Solidarity’s elites, Piotr Kapczyński noted, were naive in their belief that self-organization of society would be a remedy for all problems, and in particular, they neglected the separation of the economic and political spheres. Not only did they lack serious economic reflection, he argued, but they also fostered irresponsibility in this field: “As the movement grew confident of its strength and authority of the government dwindled, demands multiplied and so did the faith in forcing them through by increased pressure against a state that was generally considered weak. Forcing the state to be overprotective, the movement was unknowingly legitimizing its omnipotence.” ³⁵

Solidarity’s “synergy illusion” was an illusion of a weak but omnipotent state, whereas the liberal wisdom accumulated over centuries recommended a strong and minimal state as the only viable transition endgame. Remarkably, the liberals identified the task of creation of the minimal state with the task of “reconstruction of civil society,” a topical left-dissident theme, which they would hijack in service of their own project. For thinkers like Kuroń, the reconstruction of civil society meant a process in which citizens self-organize to exert pressure on the state toward democratization and recognition of their rights. In the liberal take, that democratic responsiveness was not key because struggles over redistribution would be contained as a consequence of the withdrawal of the state from all areas except those generative of market society. In that spirit, Lech Mażewski declared the support of the liberals for a “lawful authoritarian order” as an interim vehicle of transition toward liberal democracy:

We are facing the great challenge of transforming the etatist society into a market society. Eliminating the hypertrophy of the state from the social body will certainly not be painless. The reconstruction of civil society will not happen by means of a premature democratization, but by evolutionary liberalization, and emergence of democratic institutions can only be its crowning. ³⁶

Such a scenario was in the interest of the ruling elites: withdrawing from the economy and devolving many of its functions to local and regional self-government, a strong, minimal state, in which they would maintain hegemony, would be easier to manage. “Cooperation of the rulers in the reconstruction of civil society should trigger the process of downsizing the scope of entitlements that are the object of conflict between the society and the state.” ³⁷

Not unlike the Dzielski circle, the Tusk group thought that the road away from serfdom led through the creation of a strong, minimal state without political democracy, the task of that state being to engineer a social infrastructure in which the market society of owners and entrepreneurs would thrive. They also agreed with Dzielski as to the sequence of the transition: liberalization first, democratization second. Premature democratization was an obstacle on that road, and the two could not succeed at the same time, since the etatist society was unlikely to decide democratically on curtailing social entitlements. Where the Gdańsk liberals differed from the Kraków group was in the realm of realpolitik: their conviction was that the ruling elite was too weak, unqualified, fainthearted, and corrupt to succeed in building a strong, minimal state. Left to the Communists’ own devices, they would perhaps thin it out, but the state they ruled would not be strong due to their deficit of legitimacy. Only an authority emerging from opposition would be able to enhance the social trust essential for a strong state. Without such an authority, the powerholders would succumb to social pressures just as they did in 1980. This is why, all their internal criticism notwithstanding, the Gdańsk liberals were prescient to consider Solidarity as a key factor in exerting pressure to achieve the neoliberal consensus and worked inside the underground structures on the coast in order both to maintain trust and to influence the agenda of the union’s leadership.

Rare for self-professed neoliberals, but consistent with that strategy, the Tusk group—Jacek Merkel was its key liaison—helped to organize the spring and summer 1988 strikes on the coast, which together with strikes in Silesia triggered the Round Table negotiations. In that capacity, they were able to gauge the actual weakness of the underground structures. And that was good news. Weak trade union structures meant that, unlike in 1980–1981, there was no internal mechanism to hold leaders to account and no possibility of exercising voice other than through protest actions, and on the eve of 1989, it was not conceivable that workers would strike against Lech Wałęsa. Thus, if the leaders decided to embrace the liberal program, they would not be contradicted. The worker constituency could choose only loyalty or exit.

The Bias of Liberal Conservative Socialism

Hirschman observed that conservatives living in times of a progressive consensus rarely confronted their rivals directly and more often argued that an expansion of entitlements would jeopardize what was already achieved and cherished by the progressives. ³⁸ The case of Leszek Kołakowski shows that this could be equally true for a disillusioned progressive. For the dissident Left, Kołakowski was perhaps the biggest intellectual authority among the eminent refugees from March 1968. Adam Michnik credited Kołakowski for being the patron figure of the rapprochement of the Left and the Catholic community, an authority on the kind of socialism that was still worth saving, and the chief philosopher of dissident anti-politics. ³⁹ Kołakowski deserves this last appellation in part due to his famous essay “How to Be a Liberal-Conservative-Socialist,” which in elegant prose conveyed a rather simple truth: that a doctrinaire realization of any of these political creeds would pervert its respective ideological promise, and without ideological intransigence, there was ample room for reconciliation among the three. ⁴⁰ And who would like to be doctrinaire in post-totalitarian times? For people coming of age in the times of Solidarity, Donald Tusk recalled, that essay was an avowal of faith. ⁴¹

However, that famous essay stands in a rather uneasy relationship with the rest of Kołakowski’s political writings from the 1970s, first published in venues like Encounter, Merkur, and Dissent and reprinted in Polish by the émigré publisher Aneks in a successful 1982 volume. In many of these texts, Kołakowski does not profess a similar, ironic equidistance. At their core was rather a slippery-slope argument about the dangers that progressive ideas posed to Western democracy. While Havel famously remarked that post-totalitarian regimes in the East were a mirror of the West’s own latent tendencies, for Kołakowski, the enemy was already at the gates. ⁴²

Specifically, in a 1977 text, Kołakowski criticized the idea of social democracy, arguing that “the notion of social democracy, once created, set in motion ideas that revealed the dangerous potential latent in the very democratic principle. We are doomed if that principle is adopted without constraints: that would amount to negation that there exists a domain of personal life and choice, in which no majority is entitled to intervene.” ⁴³ According to Kołakowski, the progressives, in coining the term “social rights” as a correlate of social democracy, confused rights with entitlements, whereas human rights, unlike social rights, were not derived from the democratic process but rather constituted its constraint and counterweight in the name of freedom. Conversely, social democracy took democratic constraints on freedom to its higher form and triggered a process of “gradual and continuous backsliding into the abyss of democratic totalitarianism,” as demonstrated by the “undoubted and evident fact of unlimited expansion of areas of human activity which in democratic societies are taken to belong to the realm of public interest and thus regulation by democratically elected governments.” ⁴⁴ In this way, for Kołakowski, human rights had to be defended not only under the repressive conditions of a totalitarian regime but also from the suicidal tendencies intrinsic to Western democracies.

Kołakowski defended the same thesis in the essay “Self-Poisoning of Open Society” from 1979. In that essay, he takes issue with Popper’s theory, precisely on the grounds that Popper was naive to believe that the central values of open society—tolerance, rationalism, and freedom from traditional authority—could be aligned into a non-contradictory and self-reinforcing whole. Open society was thus another dangerous synergy illusion. According to Kołakowski, those values, if their pursuit was given free reign, would pose a threat to the very ideal of open society. “[O]pen society does not allow itself to be depicted as ideal, in either a normative or a methodological sense. That this is so is probably more obvious today than ever before, especially since the self-defeating power of liberal principles has become sharply evident in various ways.” ⁴⁵

In that text, the welfare state serves as an example of how totalitarian ideologies were threatening the West from the inside. Progressives defended the welfare state as a measure to protect the weak from unfettered exploitation, but the demands for expanding the civic entitlements to encompass social rights could have only one consequence: the hypertrophy of the state, which threatened the foundations of liberty and democracy that the progressives held dear. Thus, what started as an innocent attempt to create a more even playing field for the weak, Kołakowski wrote, if pursued consistently, would eventually lead straight to the Gulag, and it did not really matter whether one embraced a strong version of egalitarianism or a meritocratic variant of equality of chances. A fully meritocratic society, he warned, would entail leveling of traditional institutions such as the family, and that could be done only through totalitarian violence. Not only was the embrace of state interventionism making the West defenseless against totalitarianism; radical critique could also have deadly results, as rejection of the authority of tradition ultimately would bite its own tail, contesting the very values of the open society, whose principled defense could not be deducted on rational grounds, but was rather a matter of will, faith, and habit.

Kołakowski did not turn his critique of progressive illusions directly against Solidarity’s legacy. Throughout his émigré years, he remained a loyal supporter of the democratic opposition and had only praise for its struggle against the totalitarian dragon. Yet his message for the dissidents was clear. To paraphrase a classic remark, the struggle to achieve liberal democracy would not be accomplished but could only intensify with the fall of Communism. And from that perspective, while the Solidarity movement remained the principal strategic asset, its legacy could be perceived as a liability. If indivisibility of different forms of civic entitlements was the ideological cornerstone of the union, that cornerstone would erode not only under the spell of self-professed neoliberals but also of prophets of jeopardy such as Kołakowski.

Another émigré personality worth discussing in this context is the 1968 exile Aleksander Smolar, Kołakowski’s publisher, the spokesperson of KOR in the West, and a gifted cultural entrepreneur, who shaped the dissident milieu through his Paris-based journal Aneks (which also published books), a venue that substantially increased the intellectual impact of his colleagues from the 1968 generation but also acted as their window into the world of global political trends. ⁴⁶ After 1989, Smolar would continue to exert influence on the liberal center in various roles, including as an advisor to Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as the leader of the post-dissident liberal party formations Unia Demoratyczna (Democratic Union) and Unia Wolności (Freedom Union) and as president of the Batory Foundation, endowed by George Soros.

Tellingly, the starting point of Smolar’s 1993 text on homo sovieticus and the transition was the same essay on social class and citizenship by Marshall that Hirschman considered expressive of the postwar consensus. ⁴⁷ But unlike Hirschman, who embraced that consensus, Smolar was convinced that—despite its imitative character—the transition in Poland neither should nor could follow Marshall’s sequence. The Communist experiment, according to Smolar, turned that sequence of the development of citizenship on its head: securing social rights as a consequence of collectivization of the economy was supposed to make other dimensions of citizenship real. Not unlike for Zinov′ev, the effect could only be perverse: a human mass with a “pretensionist attitude” (postawa roszczeniowa), expecting the state to provide for it in all aspects of life. ⁴⁸ The capacity of the state to provide was mostly illusory, but society nevertheless grew to regard these illusory entitlements as inalienable rights.

The post-Communist countries, argued Smolar, needed a specifically new form of citizenship, which combined the restoration of “classical” liberties (as they were now called) with reduction of social entitlements, to chase homo sovieticus away from post-Communist political culture. Civic rights were unthinkable without legal impartiality, whereas socialism had preserved the much older inheritance of contempt for lawful behavior and the unfettered drive to achieve privileged status. Furthermore, post-Communist subjects, accustomed to exercise political agency through collective protest and other direct means of public pressure, had little understanding for the ballot and for representative democracy. Most of all, the combination of economic crisis, state weakness, and the liberal direction of the transition required a reduction of social entitlements, and it remained to be seen whether society would come to terms with the legitimacy of deep inequalities and with the murky way in which the class of capital owners was emerging, whether it would embrace the values of meritocracy and private enterprise, and whether it would put up with the condescending attitudes toward of opinion makers who not long before had idealized the working class.

For Smolar, the inheritance of socialism in the realm of social mentalities and political culture was the most pressing challenge to the transition from Communism, and homo sovieticus was the political language he chose to name that challenge. The legacy of Solidarity was part of that problem, rather than a solution, since, as often happens with revolutions, history took a different turn than the course intended by the revolutionaries:

The revolution of 1980–81 promised the full restoration of individual rights and liberties, and it brought hope for progress in the domain of political rights while maintaining security and relative equality in the social and economic domains. In 1989 ideals were confronted with reality. Instead of the expected expansion of existing rights, society faced a choice: restoration of individual and political rights and liberties, with the possibility of effective economic development, but at the price of withdrawing real or mythical social and economic entitlements.[. . .] Modernization of the country, the return to the “normal” path of development, is conditional upon restoration of inequalities eliminated by Communism. ⁴⁹

In other words, accepting the jeopardy thesis as the sort of inescapable horizon of democracy in a post-Communist state, Smolar thought that the transition from Communism could be imagined only as going through Marshall’s cycle of expansion of citizenship in reverse.

Homo sovieticus in Transition

While, after losing power to the post-Communist Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left Alliance), the post-dissident Left and the Gdańsk liberals would merge into one party, Unia Wolności, only in 1994, they developed via different routes a shared understanding of the purposes, and most of all the threats, to Poland’s self-limited revolution. The neoliberal reappraisal of the legacy of Solidarity configured that new meaning by adding a new dimension to the pre-existing dissident theme of homo sovieticus: the critique of political uncivility merged with the neoliberal proposition of incompatibility of social entitlements and the “classical liberties.” And that new understanding of the self-limiting revolution justified a range of exceptional measures that the powerless turned powerholders claimed to be necessary to offset the danger that that mixture posed to the transition from Communism.

From this perspective, “self-limited revolution” is another term that creates an illusion of continuity in dissident history, even though its meaning changes drastically under the hood: from keeping at bay the surplus of civility to taming the surplus of uncivility. In 1981, it is the aroused, but legitimate, civic aspirations that are held in check by the geopolitical position of Poland. In 1989 and the following years, it was the perverse effects of the Communist experiment persisting in the minds and habits of post-Communist subjects that came to the fore as a principal risk factor, as the geopolitical constraints imploded and successor parties exhibited loyalty to the new regime.

Fear of the surplus of uncivility was already driving the oppositional strategy in late 1988, amid the strikes that broke the stalemate between the opposition and the regime. It was hardly a secret that underground Solidarity did not initiate them (even though its re-legalization was among the strike demands), and it was not clear how long the union and Wałęsa personally would command the respect of the desperate and the angry. Avoiding an uncontrolled explosion of social anger was thus one of the principal reasons for Jaruzelski’s and Wałęsa’s men to initiate negotiations. On the oppositional end, it also served as a catalyst for building the political representation of Solidarity around a clear center of command. In the crucial meeting on 18 December 1988, when the Civic Committee was formed to claim that role, Tadeusz Mazowiecki observed: “Time is of paramount importance—time that the authorities measure by maturation of the aparat or their own positions but that for us is a time of [growing] social impatience. The question of time for reaching solutions is today the main question.” ⁵⁰ During the same meeting, Michnik justified taking up the negotiations in the name of the entire opposition by “the obligation to remember that the fundamental quality of Stalinist Communism is the decomposition of social bonds, decomposition of the legal culture. The rebellion of such a society is the rebellion of slaves, a rebellion of people who know best how to build guillotines.” ⁵¹ Leszek Kołakowski, the Committee’s honorary guest, and the eminent dissident editor and intellectual historian Marcin Król concurred that the exceptional moment of dissident politics required exceptional measures, and Poland could no longer wait for reconstructed civil society to emanate its own representation. ⁵²

This is how Bronisław Geremek, the mastermind of the Round Table Accords, defined the politics of transition during his speech opening the negotiations:

The political philosophy that we adopt in thinking about the immediate horizon of changes is a philosophy of transition [filozofia okresu przejściowego]. It posits that in that period, which should enable the evolutionary passage from totalism to democracy, in that transitional period the social accords are a form that in a way furnishes public life with institutions and arrangements of one-off validity, that are transitional, and that serve to realize the principles of the political horizon of the changing Republic. ⁵³

The mandate to put in place temporary institutions and arrangements that do not properly belong in a democracy but are necessary to produce an evolutionary exit from Communism, is the exceptional measure the political leadership of the dissident camp claimed as part of the contract. The most important of these temporary, exceptional measures was the non-democratic arrangement undersigned by the democratic opposition, which guaranteed 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm to the ruling elite (the Communists and their allies), set to expire after four years. In that moment, the main unknown was whether the governing party would honor the terms of the contract in the long term, while the motive of the surplus of uncivility was not an immediately apparent feature of the political language of the oppositional leadership, especially given that restoration of Solidarity (de-legalized in 1982) remained the principal political demand. However, that demand did not imply the intention to rebuild the movement in the scope and form it had championed back in 1981. To have Solidarity back was to demonstrate that the opposition was genuine and credible, an independent political force capable of creating political facts. As Geremek later recalled, through the negotiations “the Party wanted to get the legitimization of its rule, and it could only get it from a partner that was strong, with universal social support.” ⁵⁴

Paradoxically, the outcome of the 4 June 1989 elections and the formation of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s non-Communist government did not make the powerless, who now came to power, more optimistic about the prospects for reconstructing civil society. Quite the contrary. First, the uncertainty of whether the party and its Soviet patron would concede such a landslide defeat produced strong anxiety about democratic effervescence spiraling out of control, with the tragedy of Tienanmen Square lurking in the background. By the end of the year, however, it was clear that Gorbachev was serious about the “Sinatra Doctrine,” letting the erstwhile satellites go their way without interference. The Polish party was about to dissolve (in January 1990), and the bureaucracy was behaving loyally to the new incumbents. In other words, it was becoming clear that the threat would not be coming from the forces of the old regime. But the implosion of what Stephen Kotkin has called “uncivil society” was no reason for optimism for the powerless turned powerholders, as their concern with uncivility was much broader than the issue of the Communist establishment. ⁵⁵ The post-dissident liberals found themselves in a position that the jeopardy thesis describes as impossible. What if the neoliberals were right to claim that democratization and the building of a market society were impossible to achieve simultaneously, that premature democratization would derail economic reform? Was participation of Solidarity in government compatible with the aim of building a strong, minimal state? As we recall, for the Tusk liberals (to say nothing of the Dzielski circle), the stage of lawful authoritarianism not only was a compromise solution to accommodate the interests of the ruling elite but also had a positive purpose of engineering market society in line with the principle of liberalization first, democratization second. A Solidarity-led government, it was feared, would push toward a weak, omnipotent state rather than the strong, minimal one.

While it could not suppress the process of democratization completely, to prove these predictions wrong, the Mazowiecki government turned to the politics of exception against the perils of democratic effervescence and social anger. Mazowiecki and his supporters defended the continued validity of the contractual arrangement of the Round Table (and the mandate of exception from which it derived) despite the contract being so spectacularly annulled by popular vote on 4 June 1989, the rapid differentiation inside their own ranks, and Havel taking Prague Castle at the end of 1989 and Hungarian ex-dissidents receiving their mandates in fully open elections in spring 1990. In the justification of this position, the jeopardy thesis came to the fore: the need to control the pace of the post-totalitarian evolution due to the surplus of uncivility, an easy prey for political radicalism and populism of different signs, which, if let loose, could derail the whole process.

The jeopardy narrative of transition became the hallmark of the political discourse of the powerless turned powerholders, and homo sovieticus was the protagonist of that tale. The theologian and philosopher Józef Tischner created the most widely circulated version of that narrative, and his case is illustrative of the distance that dissident thinking had traveled between 1981 and 1989. In 1981, Tischner formulated, in a series of sermons, the Ethics of Solidarity, one of the most powerful renderings of the union’s ethos. Its central ethical concept was exploitation:

Today our ethos of solidarity is more concrete. It was born among the toiling people to liberate the work of man from avoidable suffering. Work is a natural burden of man. It is our fate to carry it. “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” However, the point is to avoid adding to that natural suffering of work unnecessary suffering—the pain inflicted by another man. That pain goes under many names; we usually call it “exploitation.” ⁵⁶

Exploitation as man-made, avoidable suffering went hand in hand with a moral sentiment of the meaninglessness of work. Tischner understood work as a form of dialogue between human beings through the medium of work’s products, which served the common good, endowing life with value and meaning. This is why the sense that labor did not serve to sustain life, or that its fruits were wasted, was highly corrosive for the dignity of the human person. Obviously, Tischner’s implicit argument was that exploitation so defined was perfectly possible in a classless society, and thus under socialism the strike remained “the meaningful thing to do in a meaningless world.” ⁵⁷ What is more interesting is that Tischner’s concept of exploitation was really regime-neutral and could continue to serve the egalitarian moral reflection even after regime change, and so his plea for “concrete democracy”—respectful for both individual liberty and mutual obligation to a shared common good, putting the dignity of the human person first—could communicate with contemporary communitarianism.

But Tischner would not take his thoughts there. A very different work ethic emerges from a series of texts from 1989 to 1990, in which Tischner set out to shape the understanding of the transition, foregrounding the inheritance of the mental habits of socialized man. The new gospel was a peculiar mixture of phenomenology, theology, and libertarianism, even though the concept of dialogue remained in the center. He defined the transition as the passage from monological to dialogical society, a change that took place in the existential realm in the first place. The “monological society” (Tischner’s rendering of Leninism) was a regime in which the rulers knew best, while their subjects were carriers of particular illusions. On the other hand, in the ideal democracy, Tischner concurred with Popper that there was no privileged point of view, and the truth emerged out of a dialogue of particular perspectives. While Solidarity forced the powers to acknowledge a point of view independent of itself, it was just a first step toward the society of dialogue. “We drag along the inheritance of forty years and remain captive to the superstitions that took root over these years.” ⁵⁸ The union might have liberated the people from the regime, but it did not exactly free them from that mental captivity. In the mighty union, the desire of socialized man that those at the top should define truth for those at the bottom found a new outlet.

While becoming the subject of truth came hard, becoming the subject of rights was even harder, as it affected the very essence of the old habits. In a way reminiscent of Robert Nozick, Tischner affirmed that to become the subject of truth implied self-ownership (the sense of owning our own lives), and in turn, self-ownership was unthinkable without recognition of the primacy of the right to private property. The totalitarian state not only collectivized property but also destroyed the very concept of property rights, divorcing work from the use of its fruits and elevating “socialist consumerism,” the right to use the fruits of somebody else’s labor, as the essence of socialized man. That socialist consumerism did not go away with the planned economy. “Only the vector of the expectation has changed.[. . .] What yesterday he [homo sovieticus] expected from the Communists, lending them support, today he expects of the capitalists. He remains the master of enjoyment.” ⁵⁹

The third step on the road toward the dialogical society was to embrace the wisdom of a strong, minimal state. The state, shaking off the burden of social needs it previously committed to satisfy (but never fully delivered), should concentrate on the key task of becoming the guardian of the law and making property the foundation of any other civic right. According to Tischner’s new gospel, the outcry against capitalist exploitation would be now considered an expression of the persistence of socialist habits. In a capitalist society, multiplying capital was the sole criterion of meaningful work, and the only alternative to capitalist exploitation, the past had shown, was to have one’s life wasted on meaningless and fruitless labor.

Tischner’s thinking thus departed from foregrounding solidarity with the exploited as the ethical core of the Solidarity movement just to arrive at the effective exclusion of that very same ethical position in the transition to a society of dialogue. After 1989, Tischner considered the kind of thinking that once he had praised as a residue of past mental habits, which hindered the transformation of homo sovieticus into citizens. Tischner’s take on homo sovieticus was particularly attractive, for it confirmed the neoliberal prejudice in the same way that an implicit personality theory does: just as some people have an impression that tall, blond men are also intelligent and fearless, Tischner posited proximity between demands for social justice and the longing for a strongman. Whoever yearned for one was suspected of yearning for the other.

Michnik proposed another variation for the jeopardy narrative of transition. In the early months following the June 1989 elections, he still thought the legacy of Solidarity had a role to play. He came out strongly in defense of Solidarity as a hegemonic, pro-democratization force, comprising a trade union and a political wing, built around the network of civic committees created in the course of the electoral campaign of 1989. Michnik affirmed that Solidarity

is a specifically Polish synthesis of formerly competing orientations [. . .]. The set of Solidarity’s principles comprises Christian ethics and a declared proximity to the values of the Catholic Church; the national tradition of struggle for freedom, independence, and tolerance; the persistent struggle for social justice and the emancipation of labor, for truth in the world of political conflicts and rationality in the world of economic decisions. ⁶⁰

At first sight, that praise reads as a triumphal revival of the synergy illusion, but in the context of the political momentum, Michnik’s intention was quite to the contrary. The role of Solidarity, according to Michnik, was to arrest, rather than foster, the process of political pluralization inside the oppositional camp. He found in the calls for more pluralism within the Solidarity movement a “confusion of words and concepts typical of democratic beginnings,” which imperiled the consolidation of democracy. For Michnik, Solidarity as a “synthesis of formerly competing orientations” makes rival perspectives at once premature and outdated:

I presume that it is impossible to reconstruct the universe of political divisions valid only a year ago. We entered a period in which new divisions typical for the post-totalitarian evolution will take shape. The democratic idea will clash with nostalgia for authoritarianism: the European idea with parochial nationalism, the open society with the closed society. This is why I maintain that a movement like Solidarity is needed in Poland. ⁶¹

While one might wonder how open society can be compatible with a “synthesis of formerly competing orientations” (Popper was rather suspicious of attempts of philosopher kings in that regard), it becomes more understandable against the overall transitional philosophy of exception. With advances of democratization, the struggle for open society would only increase, and for a brief moment, Michnik re-imagined Solidarity as a bulwark against uncivility. That would not be his last word on the matter, however.

A final example of the jeopardy narrative of transition is Bronisław Geremek’s essay “The Polish Framework of Hope,” published in June 1990 as the breach in the post-Solidarity camp was already in full swing. Geremek started with a paradox: the contract with the Communists at the Round Table led to spectacular effects that seemed to undermine its very purpose. But that was only an appearance. Rejection of totalitarianism by popular vote did not automatically set Poland on the way toward democracy. Democracy was a matter of solid institutions, civic political culture, and a pluralist political scene. Central Europe lacked that foundation and thus required a transitional stage to build it. The purpose of the contractual arrangement was not only political compromise but also to aid in configuring the transition, and as such it was still needed. In particular, three types of threats justified such an evolutionary approach: the danger of populism feeding on “egalitarian illusions” specific to the post-Communist mindset; a deficit of democratic ways of thinking and politicians’ authoritarian temptations, coupled with institutional weakness; and nationalism, which had been the simplest form of articulation of resistance under the old regime but became explosive as the country was undergoing a massive social transformation. These three dangers, Geremek argued, “neither erase nor diminish the chances that open for the central European countries in the transitional period. They justify, however, the gradual character of the changes and account for a philosophy of action that requires a necessary transitional stage in the passage from authoritarianism to democracy.” ⁶²

Furthermore, an evolutionary approach to democratic opening was all the more necessary given the revolutionary measures proposed in the economic realm. Democracy and market were indivisible, so Geremek believed, but in the process of transition, market should go first. “The programmatic radicalism of economic liberalism,” he asserted with a Schumpeterian intent, “plays a destructive function with regards to the old system and constitutes a necessary element in the transformation towards democracy.” ⁶³ Participation in public life could not be radically broadened to the same extent at the same time, given the resistance of old structures, the social costs of economic transition, and raised material aspirations, which together might produce outbursts of populism and demagoguery. Solidarity occupied an ambiguous role in that framework. For Geremek, Solidarity was still the “framework of hope,” a symbol that still could inspire patience, sacrifice, and trust in the wisdom of the government steering Poland through the transition, even though that same government now rejected its legacy of the synergy illusion, not to mention the union’s role of civic oversight in the reform process—loyalty, but no voice, as Hirschman would put it.

The jeopardy narrative of transition emerged to justify the extension of the Mazowiecki government’s exceptional mandate, originating in the Round Table accords. Before long, it spectacularly backfired, as it drove ambitious politicians as different as Donald Tusk and Jarosław Kaczyński to form together a short-lived alliance with Lech Wałęsa in a presidential campaign that targeted the contractual arrangement and the political monopoly inside the Solidarity camp. In that internecine conflict, dubbed “war at the top,” the jeopardy narrative of transition reached its apex. Even though he was attacked by Mazowiecki supporters as the populist gravedigger of burgeoning democracy, Wałęsa emerged victorious. It could not happen otherwise, since the offer of loyalty without voice that the powerless turned powerholders extended to the post-Solidarity camp frustrated too many hopes for political agency. Also, while mistrust in fellow citizens was always a factor in Polish politics, and thus there was a constituency that identified with the jeopardy narrative, it never had a mass appeal, and in this sense, homo sovieticus—the figure of that mistrust— provided a shaky foundation for the emerging liberal center.

Nevertheless, that early defeat of post-dissident liberalism, rather than triggering a reckoning, consolidated the jeopardy narrative of transition and provoked a further disconnect with the legacy of dissent. Just like Donald Tusk embraced liberalism in a gesture of rejection of the political traditions that informed that legacy, Michnik would ultimately identify his liberalism with a similar critical position in coming to terms with the past, tracing residues of uncivility in the historical subconscious. If the Mazowiecki government lost to post-dissident contenders parading in historical attire, and if the contractual arrangement was contested in the name of resurrecting Polish parliamentary traditions and old party banners, that could have happened only because these historical traditions had not undergone a critical historical reassessment: “without such a reassessment, we are doomed to idealize our past, we are doomed to a sense of history burdened with myths rather than sober judgments, and we are doomed to be defenseless against what might be called the revenge of memory, a memory that was for years relegated to the subconscious.” ⁶⁴

Idealization of past politics was defenseless against the trappings of fundamentalism, whether that fundamentalism was driven by nationalism, religion, or the moralism of the anti-Communist resistance. The legacy of Solidarity was not to be spared. Next to religious and nationalist fundamentalism, the recent Polish past was burdened by the legacy of the “revolt of the crowd,” a harbinger of populism for Polish liberal democracy in formation. Solidarity was populist, Michnik now claimed, because the language of the worker protest against the totalitarian state was populist. It was irrational to contest Communist rule in the name of the egalitarian principles of social justice that legitimized that rule. Solidarity’s elites not only failed to transform the revolt of the crowd into more civic forms. It was these elites that learned that they were most effective when speaking the language of the crowd. Against this background, Michnik’s earlier writings, admonishing against the contempt of the liberators for the liberated, read like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Conclusion

Post-dissident liberalism has often been idealized as a political culture of moderation. ⁶⁵ Among public intellectuals, Aleksander Smolar set out to capture its particular pathos. Despite the transition’s velvet course and imitative, anticlimactic agenda, he argued that the script of the revolutionary dramas of the past was still there in 1989. The exit from Communism did involve the figures of the moderate, the radical, and the defender of the old regime. The casting was not perfect, since the Polish Jacobins militated on the right, and the elite of the old regime had no appetite for counterrevolution. Only the dissident architects of the changes, Smolar thought, bore a close resemblance to their French ancestors, the moderates. The dissident friends of the Rights of Man embraced evolutionism, called for unity and reconciliation, and avoided extraordinary measures that in the long term would turn against the effort at building democracy, market society, and the rule of law. Smolar’s assessment of the “moderantism” of the post-dissident liberals was unshaken by what he himself saw as “extremism of moderation”—their fervent anti-radicalism, which led them to identify revolutions with terror alone, to reject (more forcefully than elsewhere) the imperative of transitional justice, and thus to downplay the role that moral regeneration could have had in consolidating popular support for the revolution. And that anti-Jacobinism, according to Smolar, was due to their conviction about the uncivility of post-Communist society, which he happened to share. Just like other remnants of the old regime that could die out only gradually, with the consolidation of the new order, homo sovieticus would be transformed by the gradual work of liberal pedagogy. ⁶⁶

This essay strikes the balance differently. The actor of the French revolutionary drama that Smolar’s screenplay did not take into account was the Thermidorians. The Thermidorians ruled in the fifteen months following the fall of Robespierre, during which time they not only pacified the radicals and restored the representative institutions of the Republic and a measure of press freedom but also faced the fundamental political challenge of ending the revolution. To do justice to the experience of Jacobin rule, Bronisław Baczko suggested not only doing justice to the terrorists and their victims without producing yet another violent cycle but also to do justice to the revolution itself, to salvage those of its achievements that could still be redeemed. Most of all,

Thermidor is the key moment when the Revolution must carry the weight of its past and admit that it will not keep all its initial promises. It is above all the moment when the protagonists proclaim that they wish neither to recommence its history nor remake its experience. Thermidor is the moment when the revolutionaries retain only one desire, are motivated by only one wish: to end, finally, the Revolution. ⁶⁷

While Baczko’s book on the matter was published on the French Revolution’s bicentenary, in Poland a new instance of revolutionary drama began that same year. Its uniqueness resided in the fact that some revolutionaries of 1989 were driven by the overreaching desire of short-circuiting the revolution and going directly into the Thermidorian phase, which Michnik aptly called “velvet restoration.” Pre-emptive Thermidorianism is thus a term that describes much better than moderantism the nature of the self-limitation of the Polish revolution, for the simple reason that coming before the terror, moderantism was not acting out against its experience. Moreover, pre-emptive Thermidorianism differs from moderantism in the kind of unintended consequences it produces, similar to other kinds of pre-emptive politics. Acting in good faith, pre-emptive Thermidorians frustrated the great expectations that defeating the old regime aroused and hurt the political passions of the freedom fighters, brought under suspicion of falling on the uncivil side of society before any deeds could confirm or refute this suspicion.

Most importantly, Thermidorianism foregrounds, against the self-image of post-dissident liberals, their rhetorical intransience, the feature of reactionary rhetoric to which Hirschman attributed a corrosive effect on the public sphere. If the liberal center embraces reactionary rhetoric, what space exists for a moderate conservativism to emerge to the right? How can the Right be other than radical? In particular, is it not the case that the liberal center occupied much of the terrain that used to belong to the political tradition of modern conservatism? One recalls the Stańczyk group of mid-nineteenth-century Kraków conservatives, strongly critical of Polish mental habits, deriding romantic insurrectionism on the left and the right as feeding on these bad habits and condemning both as a handicap to Poland’s civilizational growth, finally looking for remedies in developing a strong state and market institutions. ⁶⁸ If that tradition did not feed into a post-1989 revival (despite its popularity among the dissident conservatives), it is because among other reasons intellectual positions associated with this thread of conservative thought were taken up by the post-dissent liberal center. This is one of the reasons why conservative revolutionaries, or populists as they are often called, thrive in Poland. “Polarization” is perhaps not the best term to describe this complicity in adversity. What post-dissident liberalism and populism share is the impossibility of imagining post-1989 Polish democracy as consolidated, an inability to think beyond the political imaginary of a democracy in jeopardy, whose fate is in constant peril. And to paraphrase the Thomas theorem, what cannot be perceived as consolidated cannot be consolidated in consequences.