“Casting off the coat of Konrad”: Polish intelligentsia in the era of system transformation

Abstract

This article outlines the means of adaptation by the Polish intelligentsia to the conditions of a free-market (capitalist) system. The ethos of the Polish intelligentsia is at a fundamental level in conflict with the ethos of the middle class. Research conducted in the 1990s into social stratification in Poland clearly showed that it was the intelligentsia that was claiming the best new employment positions that “opened up” along with the market and democracy. Nonetheless, sociologists consider changes in consciousness to be phenomena belonging to the so-called longue duree. For this reason, it has been useful to show how the beneficiaries of the new system are handling the order of norms and values that, while subject to reconstruction, has clear consequences at the level of lifestyle, way of thinking, and means of constructing one’s own biography.