Political hegemony and the intellectual production in the world semi-periphery (Contribution to modern sociology of the school of Prof. Tomasz Zarycki)

Abstract

In the conditions of military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the future of Ukrainian sociology largely depends on the ability to be included in the world processes of the development of science. The openness of the sociological community of Ukraine to prospective development trends in world sociology is necessary. The most favorable conditions for the emergence of stable dialogical relations exist in the relations between the Ukrainian and Polish sociological communities, which is due to the significant common past of our peoples, in many respects common problems and possible common perspectives. In modern Polish sociology, one of the most open to dialogue is the Warsaw sociological school of Prof. Tomasz Zarycki. Research of its participants, and first of all Prof. T. Zarycki, cover a wide range of problems: from changes in the social space of Poland to the peculiarities of the reformation of the ruling class and the production of political knowledge. A special feature of the school is the intense search for an adequate methodology for the study of modern society. This methodological search led to the synthesis of the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which made it possible to cover the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of social life in a single perspective. The peculiarities of the transformation of the society of state socialism into the society of liberal capitalism in modern Poland are largely determined by the fact that the basis of the political class here was formed from representatives of the intelligentsia. This explains the insignificant weight of the bourgeoisie in the political life of the country, the absence of such a phenomenon as the oligarchy. At the same time, in global conditions, the Polish intelligentsia found itself in a difficult situation, because the country remained on the semi-periphery of the world capitalist system. This leads to the fact that the production of knowledge about society takes place in hierarchical relations, where the rules are set by the countries of the world center.