Punkty za inteligenckość. Agaty Zysiak rekonstrukcja historii Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego a rola PRL w umocnieniu inteligenckiej hegemonii

Abstract

The departure point for the author’s reflections is Agata Zysiak’s book entitled Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] (2016). He develops his earlier ideas on the role of the intelligentsia in Poland’s social hierarchy, particularly in connection with the world elite, which, after Bourdieu, he calls the “field of power.” Zysiak’s analyses provide him with arguments for the statement that the period of the Polish People’s Republic can be treated, in multiple dimensions, as having strengthened the position of the intelligentsia and especially of selected milieus within it. Zysiak’s proposed description of the “university in a workers’ city” produces a picture of the triumph of the intelligentsia-elite, whom the new institution of higher learning effectively forms into a successive tool for the strengthening of its privileged status. It also, in the author’s opinion, a factor in the failure of the “new bourgeoisie,” that is, the parts of the middle class that after the periods of modernization reforms had large hopes of maintaining both their status and financial privileges. At the same time, in opposition to the traditional intelligentsia, the new bourgeoisie overlooked the classic distinction games of the elite and believed in the compensatory strength of the manifestation their — usually recently — acquired material resources. The author also reflects on the current picture of Polish scholarship.