The alternative in Eastern Europe at century's start: Brozozowski and Machajski on intellectuals and socialism

Abstract

It is unfortunate how unfamiliar social theorists and philosophers from Western Europe and even more so North America are with the East European critical intellectual legacy. Debates among leading East European communist intellectuals are usually part of the Western critical repertoire, and occasionally some anarchist contributions might inform Western thinking. But it is relatively rare to find theorists such as Machajski and especially Brzozowski in the bibliographies of Western products, even while the experiences of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. are becoming the stock of what transforms the critical perspective. This, I believe, is a major handicap for the analysis of socialism, as the issues that are central to the problem of socialism - the relationship between intellectuals and other classes on the one hand, and on the other the relationship between class and nationality - are dealt with in a more sustained manner by East European than by other intellectual cultures. I shall return to this claim in the conclusion of this essay, but it might be an argument difficult to sustain with East Europeans today as the Polish critical legacy pales in the light of the angloamerimania of contemporary Eastern European intellectual culture. One will not find many intellectuals focusing on Machajski and Brzozowski in Poland today. Indeed, Maehajski has never really been much of a part of Polish intellectual culture, given his anti-intellectual and anti-national stance. 2 Brzozowski is periodically fashionable in Polish culture, but at the present he is quite invisible in intellectual life.