The aim of this book is to explain economic dualism in the history of modern Europe. The emergence of the manorial-serf economy in the Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary in the 16 th and the 17 th centuries was the result of a cumulative impact of various circumstantial factors. The weakness of cities in Central Europe disturbed the social balance -so characteristic for Western-European societies -between burghers and the nobility. The political dominance of the nobility hampered the development of cities and limited the influence of burghers, paving the way to the rise of serfdom and manorial farms. These processes were accompanied by increased demand for agricultural products in Western EuropeThe Author Krzysztof Brzechczyn is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He has authored several books and papers in different languages. His fields of interest include modern history, intellectual history, philosophy of history, social philosophy, and theory of historiography.

The purpose of this paper is an interpretation of the social and political thought of the Solidarity movement in the light of the political philosophy of communitarianism. In the first part of the paper, the controversies between liberalism and communitarianism are characterized in order to outline the communitarian response toward the authoritarian/totalitarian challenge. In the second part, the programme of a self-governing republic created by Solidarity is interpreted in the spirit of communitarianism. I reconstruct the ideal vision of human being expressed in of ficial trade union’s documents and essays of Solidarity’s advisers e.g., Stefan Kurowski and Jozef Tischner, and the efforts of the movement for telling the truth about history and its vision of Polish history. Also, I interpret the programme of Self-Governing Republic adopted during the First National Convention of Delegates of Solidarity. In these programmatic documents of Solidarity, one may find ideas characteristic both of the communitarian and liberal political philosophy. However, the liberal ones—including, primarily, the guarantee of human and citizens’ rights, and of individual liberties—were subordinated to the postulate of reconstructing the national and social community. In the course of transformation after 1989, these communitarian elements of Solidarity programme, incompatible with liberal ideological agenda, have been erased.

The aim of this article is to compare the effectiveness of two political systems: liberal democracy and illiberal democracy in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The analysis has been carried out on the basis of the theoretical assumptions and conceptualization of non-Marxian historical materialism. In the first part of my article, I present the concept of ‘regulative credit” which has been introduced in that theory. In standard socio-political conditions, the growth of power regulations is usually contested by citizens. However, in a situation of danger, when social order is undermined, citizens support the authorities’ extraordinary regulations. This social support, called regulative credit, lasts as long as the danger persists. In chapter two, I characterize shortly liberal and illiberal democracies. In liberal democracy, there is a balance between different branches of power, and citizens share a socio-political consciousness of the individualistic type. In illiberal democracy, the executive branch of power – although it has been democratically chosen – has an advantage over the two other kinds of power, and citizens share a socio-political consciousness of the collectivist type. Those differences result in diverse reactions of the authorities to a situation of threat. The political authorities of an illiberal democracy react faster in comparison with the political authorities in liberal democracies that react slower. Also, the attitude of citizens toward the introduced restrictions varied. Societies of illiberal democracies are more self-disciplined and more willing to accept restrictions from above. Whereas societies of liberal democracies are more individualistic and less willing to accept limitations. In the fourth part of my paper, I analyze briefly the influence of the pandemic on globalization processes and on the relations between the EU and the nation states in Europe. In the summary (chapter five), I predict that the mass use of modern technologies to control social life and strengthening of the sovereignty of nation states will be the two most important effects of the pandemic.

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