The Solidarity movement of 1980–81 transformed Polish society and the nature of socialism in Eastern Europe. In its five hundred days, this trade union and social movement put to rest any lingering hope that Poland's Communist Party could represent the interests of the working class or of the Polish nation. The vast majority of Poles came to identify with Solidarity and the alternative future it advanced. In 1981, Adam Michnik, one of Solidarity's leading intellectuals, wrote that it was “too soon to give a sociological profile of this movement” (1985:129). As Solidarity enters the Polish parliament in 1989, the time has come for sustained sociological analysis of this movement and the principles for which it struggled.

Solidarity's alternative rested upon the principles of social self-organization. This principle recognizes the right of all social groups to form their own organizations in order to articulate their own demands and to defend their own interests. In this, Solidarity sought to construct a civil society, where pluralism and an open public sphere would reign over the state instead of the state reigning over them.

The principles of a civil society challenge fundamentally the organizing principles of Soviet-type society. Where the Soviet-type system is based on the unity of state and society, civil society depends on their separation. Where the Soviet-type system acknowledges no antagonistic interests, civil society assumes them to exist and prepares rules to adjudicate among antagonists.