A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is a sequel to Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. It begins with the end of the Great War, depicting the colorful intellectual landscape of the interwar period and the increasing political and ideological radicalization culminating in the Second World War. Taking the war experience both as a breaking point but in many ways also a transmitter of previous intellectual traditions, it maps the intellectual paradigms and debates of the immediate postwar years, marked by a negotiation between the democratic and communist agendas, as well as the subsequent processes of political and cultural Stalinization. Subsequently, the post-Stalinist period is analyzed with a special focus on the various attempts of de-Stalinization and the rise of revisionist Marxism and other critical projects culminating in the carnivalesque but also extremely dramatic year of 1968. This volume is followed by Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018.

The three-part work provides a first synthetic account of the history of the Polish intelligentsia from the days of its formation to World War I. Part one (1750-1831) traces the formation of the intelligentsia as a social class in the epoch of Enlightenment. It stresses the importance of the birth of bureaucratic institutions that created the demand for the educated stratum. It analyses the results of the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 - the ominous event that transformed the political geography of East Central Europe. The work combines social and intellectual history, tracing both the formation of the intelligentsia as a social stratum and the forms of engagement of the intelligentsia in the public discourse. Thus, it offers a broad view of the group's transformations which immensely influenced the course of the Polish history.

Based on solid research, this erudite study is a first attempt at presenting a comprehensive analysis of nineteenth-century Polish liberalism. Polish liberal tradition has generally been considered weak or even nonexistent. Janowski, on the other hand, argues that nineteenth-century Poland inherited a strong protoliberal tradition from the nobility-based democracy, and that in the mid-nineteenth century, liberalism was a dominant trend in Polish intellectual life, even if it rarely appeared in its pure form and did not create political movements separating liberal aims from patriotic ones. The author maintains that the definition of liberalism in Central Europe should not be based on the Anglo-Saxon model, in view of the weakness of the middle classes and, in the case of partitioned Poland, the lack of independent statehood. This explains why there was a marked etatist trend among liberal thinkers, who saw the creation of a strong state as a tool of modernization. Janowski sees his subject in a broad comparative perspective, taking into account the historical experience of other nations of Central Europe. His innovative interpretation may be the starting point for new debates in the ongoing discussion on the different perceptions of liberalism.