The aim of the article is twofold. First, it is to interpret the main philosophical ideas of the Polish cooperative movement from the first part of the twentieth century and how they were applied in practice, by using the conceptual vocabulary of post-structuralist and post-Operaist political philosophy; and, second, to further develop the notion of -institutions of the common‖ that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri introduced -during debates about alternatives to both capitalism and the state-form -with their formulation of -principles of the common‖, which is to say, general principles for creating democratic and popular institutions around the ideas of inclusion and solidarity, an ethos of mutual help and democratic governance over production and exchange of material wealth.

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In this article, I reflect on the Warsaw school of the history of ideas (WSHI), a loose collective of people that formed after the birth of the communist system in Poland. First, I analyse the biographical factors that determined the political and intellectual choices of the WSHI members. Next, I attempt to show the nature of their public attitudes, which can be seen as part of the habitus of post-war Marxist intellectuals in Poland. My aim is to investigate how it happened that the WSHI, while was an element of Polish state at the beginning, became, in the 1960s, one of the primary points of contestation in Poland and an indicator of the collapse of the project of institutionalising Marxism-Leninism in Polish universities. I assume that the transformation did not entail a simple transmission from the nineteenth century to post-war revisionism but instead implied a series of breaks with, and migrations of, ideological models. Therefore, this analysis does not trace the line that separated the Polish leftist tradition from post-war communism, but rather describes their relationship, showing how the ethos of the socially engaged intelligentsia in Poland fitted into scholarly post-war biographies. My hypothesis is the following: in the case of the WSHI, the element of connection was a feature that Andrzej Mencwel refers to as “culturalism”—an ethical attitude inherited from earlier generations of leftist humanists.

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