Artykuł podejmuje próbę podsumowania dorobku badawczo-pisarskiego Jerzego Jedlickiego (1930–2018) jako historyka XIX w. Analizie poddane zostały wszystkie książki Jedlickiego, ważniejsze artykuły oraz recenzje, a także zasoby archiwalne z Instytutu Historii PAN, z którym związana była cała jego kariera zawodowa. Zaakcentowano następujące zagadnienia: ewolucja stosunku do marksizmu i – szerzej – determinizmu historycznego; nowatorskie podejście na styku historii społecznej i historii idei; poglądy na miejsce historii pośród nauk społecznych i naturę poznania historycznego; indywidualny styl pisarski Jedlickiego oraz funkcję ironii jako narzędzia interpretacyjnego; wreszcie jego poglądy na społeczne i polityczne konsekwencje głównych nurtów ideowych w Polsce w XIX stuleciu. The article analyses the legacy of Jerzy Jedlicki (1930–2018) as a historian of the nineteenth century. The analysis covers his books, his main articles and the most characteristic reviews, as well as archival materials from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where Jedlicki worked for his entire professional career. The following problems are emphasized: the evolution of his attitude to Marxism and historical determinism; his attempts to combine the methods of social history and the history of ideas; his approach to the main challenges of history as a social science and a discipline of the humanities; his individual authorial style and the function of irony as an interpretative tool. And finally, his attitude towards the main ideological currents in the nineteenth-century Poland.
This paper investigates the history of the concept of bourgeoisie in Poland, emphasising troubles with its assimilation into the Polish language, and its special entanglement with the socialist and modernist discourse. The concept, it is argued, was borrowed in the late nineteenth century from France, where it concerned the urban upper-middle class; it arrived in Poland as part of the socialist discourse of the time, which gave it strong negative and derogatory connotations. The ambiguity that arose was further complicated by a number of other factors as well. First, the understanding of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ within the leftist discourse was itself ambivalent, combining the strictly theoretical definition encompassing the class of capitalist owners of the means of production, and the practical and emotional label attached to the urban classes. Second, also for the reasons indicated above, the concept of bourgeoisie was not able to replace the older Polish concepts regarding the urban population [mieszczaństwo], and the differences between them remained vague, and occasionally disputable. Third, not only did the term ‘bourgeoisie’ never fully emancipate itself from the domination of the indigenous concepts, but it also suffered from its translation into Polish, where it was regularly omitted when regarding Western European realities, but where it was a permanent fixture in the case of Russian and Soviet literature. Finally, the paper searches for the reasons behind the relative elimination of the concept from the Polish discourse, or at least large segments thereof, in the last half-century.
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