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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland
- Introduction: Points of Permeable Contact
- 1 History and Theory in Practice
- 2 Precocious Reformer: Hungary
- 3 Injustice: Poland 1948–1980
- 4 Poland: From Solidarity to 1989
- 5 Hungary: Property Relations Recast
- 6 Schumpeter by the Danube: From Second Economy to Private Sector
- 7 Action and Reaction: Institutional Consequences of Private-Sector Expansion
- Conclusion: Despotism, Discovery, and Surprise
- Index
4 - Poland: From Solidarity to 1989
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland
- Introduction: Points of Permeable Contact
- 1 History and Theory in Practice
- 2 Precocious Reformer: Hungary
- 3 Injustice: Poland 1948–1980
- 4 Poland: From Solidarity to 1989
- 5 Hungary: Property Relations Recast
- 6 Schumpeter by the Danube: From Second Economy to Private Sector
- 7 Action and Reaction: Institutional Consequences of Private-Sector Expansion
- Conclusion: Despotism, Discovery, and Surprise
- Index
Summary
The question at the center of intellectual life in the last thirty six years is discourse.
Magyar Fuzetele, 1981We ought not to allow our language to turn into a litany of fixed formulations, for frozen language leads to frozen thought.
Alfred G. Meyer, 1960The second economy in Poland, as we just saw, is best understood as having been divided into two large islands, whereas in Hungary it increasingly resembled a pyramid at whose center were a variety of informal and – increasingly – formal institutional links with the state sector. The metaphor of separate islands would have appealed to Poland's great classical sociologist, Stefan Nowak, who understood all of Polish society analogously. For him, the family and its immediate social circle were pitted against the communist state; in between was an enormous “social vacuum.” But in fact, during the 1980s especially, a richly complex civil-social sphere emerged in Poland. If in Hungary by the early 1980s we see a dense institutional landscape in the economic sphere, in Poland we see a proliferation of voluntary associations, particularly after Jaruzelski's military coup at the end of 1981.
By the mid-1980s, these associations constituted an incipient civil society. Already, just two weeks after martial law was imposed, the Committees for Social Resistance (KOS) emerged. A dizzying array of informal activities soon proliferated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and PolandFrom Communism to the European Union, pp. 103 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006