The rise and fall of rule by Poland's best and brightest

Abstract

Introduction: the intelligentsia and its ethos DURING POLAND'S PERIOD OF TRANSITION from the initial 1989 electoral contest up to the 1991 parliamentary campaign, the intelligentsia component of the collapsing Solidarity coalition made three bids to achieve political domination. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of these bids for power and the role that they played in the transition. The importance of the intelligentsia for the development of Polish society notwithstanding, attempts to define the milieu precisely have always been problematic. Although works that focused on defining some specific subcomponent of this extremely diverse milieu did offer a partial portrait, nonetheless, such an approach traditionally posed the danger of 'not seeing the forest for the trees'. Namely, focusing, for example, on either some element of the 'old', 19th century intelligentsia, or later, its artistic, technical, academic, Polish-Jewish, Eastern,