Preliminary Material

The self as a multitude: Edward Abramowski’s social philosophy and the politics of cooperativism in Poland at the turn of the 20th century

“…Stateless socialism was a distinguishing feature of the political narrative and became essential to the idea of the country’s grassroots social and economic redevelopment during the Partition. In the interwar period, this narrative would become a key political ideology, acknowledged as such mainly in circles of the independence-seeking left, but above all by cooperativists (Bilewicz, 2017; Błesznowski, 2018; Mencwel, 2009). The ideology of cooperativism was based on the conviction that transitioning to a socialist formation would not take place automatically, but instead would occur only through the conscious action of the working class (Tych, 1982: 65).…”

“…This relational epistemology, which is deeply immersed in the late 19th-century philosophy of life, allows Abramowski to formulate a doctrine of ‘sociological phenomenalism’ (Abramowski, 1965d: 104; see also Błesznowski, 2018: 27) in contradistinction to Émile Durkheim’s sociology and Gabriel Tarde’s social psychology. Through the notion of apperception, which he articulates in his Issues of Socialism ( Zagadnienia socjalizmu ) and which is a central instance for the social nature of all phenomena, Abramowski strives to reconcile extreme methodological sociologism (Durkheim), for which social phenomena constitute a reality fully independent of individuals, and ontological psychologism (Tarde), which in his interpretation reduces all objective phenomena to the desires and beliefs of a specific individual (Abramowski, 1965d: 101).…”