Thought
LIBERALS RETURN
For more than twenty years the conservative liberalism has been a dominating trend of public life in Poland.
Religion – voluntary enslavement
It is not going to be a text about God or faith. Strange? Not really, since religion is paradoxically not always about God and faith. Maybe they should be searched for in one’s soul rather than in any kind of ideology or place?
It is difficult to write about freedom for a person that [...]
128 years on the sidelines
Around what values did liberal parties organize in Europe and historical reasons of institutionalized weaknesses of liberalism in Poland.
It seems that the political scene of Poland has gone through two decades of which the latter is still in progress. The first phase was characterized by a major instability of political parties which were [...]
The body as a battlefield
Liberals are often compelled to stress that the state is not the only body able to limit the freedom of an individual. Liberalism originally developed to restrict the arbitrariness of state authorities and aimed to prevent the private sphere of life from the influence of interventionist bureaucrats. However, having built the constitutional system of the [...]
Polish Flavoured Patriotism
Couple of weeks ago when I was disembarking from a plane in Brussels, I came across a woman with two exceptionally polite and well-mannered small children. On the way to the baggage claim the boy of preschool age was singing loudly “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego” (“Dąbrowski’s Mazurek” – Polish national anthem). “One can see that the boy [...]
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Liberal mosaic
Ralf Dahrendorf was a liberal thinker for whom the conflicts procedeeing in various ways in the highly complicated structure of the society seem to be a permanent phenomenon. Modern liberalism, offering freedom of three kinds, composed his response, a difficult response for darious needs and contradictory interests. The goal of liberalism was apparently impossible ereconciliation [...]
Towards the liberal capitalist order
Explanation
The author owns “Liberte” readers an explanation. As I took part, from the very first days of the transformation (or even much earlier), in various liberal program trials and errors, I created, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, numerous proposals concerning such a program. At first they were obviously proposals concerning systemic changes, but from the [...]
Liberalism versus democracy
The 20th anniversary of the events from 1989 is currently being celebrated. Poland regained its independence, and the most tangible proof of that was the implementation of democracy. The right to free election, which the Polish nation was deprived of almost all its history, identifies with freedom. A free man is one who can cast [...]
What does it mean to be a liberal in contemporary Poland?
There is the only one honest answer I can give to this question: I don’t know. I am not being coy and admitting to this agnosticism derives from a deeper uncertainty as to what liberalism “really” is, in general, but also more specifically, what it is in Poland.
I think the question itself about the „true” [...]
The Decline of the Democracy. The Mob and its leaders.
Although the democracy is defined by the peoples’ rule, it needs its own aristocracy as well. In antic Greece ‘klerotoi ek procrioton’ (which means: chosen from ‘the chosen’), not only were the ‘product’, but also a testimony of a collective wisdom. Hence, elite of choice does not offend democracy, but legitimizes it. That is way [...]
