Wiktor Marzec
Biographic Data
| ID | 323707 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wiktor Marzec |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wiktor |
| FAMILY NAME | Marzec |
| SIGNATURE | MARZEC W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warsaw |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0722-7625 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Revolution That Did Not Happen. Labor Insurgency in Late Russian Poland
Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian Empire. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region after 1917, Poland remained relatively calm. Forging a new statehood after 1918 rivaled the earlier popular drive toward social revolution. Revolution was aborted in Poland; in other rim regions of the Russian Empire, however, …
Parliament and Revolution
This article explores the political trajectories of the early twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland in the context of the 'global parliamentary moment,' when the constitutional script of revolution competed with the more daring script of social revolution. We scrutinize contrastive political choices of socialist parties in these two western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Finland and Poland emerged as independent p…
Całkiem zwyczajny kraj. Forum recenzyjne
Kolejne forum recenzyjne Praktyki Teoretycznej mierzy się z syntezą najnowszej historii Polski pióra amerykańskiego historyka Briana Porter-Szűcsa. Praca pomyślana jako przeciwwaga dla narracji o Polsce i Polakach charakterystycznej dla ostatnich dziesięcioleci, martyrologicznej i skupionej na sobie, spotkała się z żywym odzewem. Za prowokacyjną uznali tę książkę nie tylko świadomi (lub nie) przedstawiciele „martyrologicznej” ortodoksji i wyznawc…
Who May Represent a Nation in Upheaval? The Concept of Representation during the Polish November Uprising, 1830–1831
This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about the impact of the uprising and warfare on revamping the concept of representation. A representative, parliamentary, but not yet democratic order emerged under the conditions of reduced sovereignty. We demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in times of w…
Landed Nation
This article investigates the ethnic entanglements of the land reform debate in the first Polish Diet (1919–1922). Against the backdrop of global comparative studies, interwar Poland, haunted by land hunger, rural poverty, and high concentration of land ownership, is an odd case. Despite conditions conducive to far-reaching land reforms, that is, a high level of inter-elite conflict and semiautocratic order, the Polish reform was very moderate, i…
From Empires of Nations to the Nation-State of Minorities
The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the n…
A sub-imperial realm amidst the global parliamentary moment
This article seeks to explore the ideal of parliament nurtured by various political actors in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland, up to the formation of the Polish nation state after the interim German occupation. Spanned between the legacy of the noble Sejms and radical democratic ideas for future Poland, the cultural imagination of parliamentarism faced its imperfect embodiment in the existing imperial assemblies – above all, the Russian …
Subversive Concepts
“The worst thing one can do with words,” George Orwell once wrote, “is to surrender to them.” One must “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way,” to use language for “expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought,” he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements “let the meaning to choose the words” and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surr…
Forging Polity in Times of International Class War
This article examines the impact of internal and external pressures on the parliamentary debate concerning the place of the working class within a newly emerging polity. Based on machine-assisted distant reading and close hermeneutics of parliamentary session transcripts, I ask how the first diet of the modern Polish state (1919–1922) responded to labour militancy and war. My analysis demonstrates that social unrest was successfully used by the l…
One of the oldest states in Europe has never suppressed any nation’. The minority treaty, nationalist indignation and the foundations of interwar ethnic democracy in Poland
This article investigates the internal impact of the Minority Treaty of Versailles, regulating minority rights and protection in the emerging interwar Polish state. The parliamentary debate on the Treaty was a critical juncture structuring the political sphere and arguably fostered the birth of ‘ethnic democracy’ in Poland. Performing a sequential analysis of the debate, I study the reconfiguration of political positions which locked the actors i…
Polish Politics before and after the Holocaust
This essay offers an overview of antisemitic entanglements of the Polish public sphere. It presents three dense vignettes, each of them illustrating a conjuncture that retraced the lines of political antagonism within the Polish public sphere: antisemitic discourses of the intelligentsia, used to push out new claimants from the public sphere during the 1905 Revolution; antisemitic undertones of the parliamentary debate on minority protection in 1…
(Im)mobilités des idées. Socialismes itinérants dans les régions de Pologne et de Finlande de l’empire de Russie
Cet article se penche sur le concept de socialisme itinérant et propose une étude comparée des deux frontières occidentales de l’empire de Russie – c’est-à-dire le royaume de Pologne et le grand-duché de Finlande. La méthode comparative a pour objectif d’examiner la naissance, l’expansion et la chute du socialisme depuis ses premières manifestations jusqu’à la révolution de 1905. Nous utiliserons ici la méthode du transfert d’idées modernes, afin…
Rising Subjects
Civil society under pressure
(2020). Civil society under pressure: historical legacies and current responses in Central Eastern Europe. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Vol. 28, Civil Society under Pressure: Historical Legacies and Current Responses in Central Eastern Europe, pp. 1-6
Civil society and the public sphere. Historical trajectories in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria
This paper seeks to explain the current attacks on civil society in Central-Eastern Europe by means of a comparative historical sociology of the public sphere. I relate current populist discourses targeting liberal civil society practitioners in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria to the historical developments of the public sphere in those countries from the emergence of the modern political sphere (late 19th century) till today. In all three cases I c…
Historicizing the asynchronous modernity in the Global East
In this paper, we aim to forge potentially generalizable insights into “Eastern” urbanity and its confrontation with modernity. We radically historicize analytical categories such as modernity and take them as vernacular categories of practice utilized by actors in a given space and time. Grounding our theorizing in findings from a larger research project on modern self-perceptions in an industrial city (Łódź in today’s central Poland), we descri…
Working Out Socialism
This essay examines socialist workers' autobiographies as inscriptions of the self unfolding from illicit political militancy in tsarist times to the establishment of actually existing socialism in twentieth-century Poland. The autobiographies written in state socialism pin together the workers' strivings for a better life with their intellectual pursuits and their negotiation of the relationship between work and politics. While this essay is inf…
Repertoires of industrial conflict in a modern city. Łódź, Central Poland 1861-1921
This article examines the changing patterns of industrial conflict in a rapidly modernizing Eastern European city, focusing on a multi-ethnic industrial hub. I follow repertoires of contention in four crucial moments characterized by shifting scales of the geopolitical embeddedness of the city: (1) an early Luddite riot of 1861 in the Polish autonomous sub-state within the Russian Empire, (2) the first massive labor protest and the following pogr…
The Birth of the Militant Self
The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery and destitution, (2) autodidacticism, (3) politi…
Socialisms in the Tsarist Borderlands
This article presents a conceptual history of socialism in two Western borderlands of the Russian Empire-namely, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland. A contrastive comparison is used to examine the birth, dissemination, and breakthrough of the concept from its first appearance until the Revolution of 1905. The concept entered Polish political conversation as a self-applied label among émigrés in the 1830s, whereas the opponents o…
Wyparte historie XIX wieku
W prezentowanym numerze Praktyki Teoretycznej stawiamy sobie stosunkowo skromne zadanie
Vernacular Marxism
The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political langua…
Under one common banner
Marzec investigates socialist strategies in relationship to antisemitism during the 1905–7 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. An extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals a dialogical differentiation of political identities and ideological positions. Antisemitism was an important political device used by the National Democracy party (Endecja) to assist in the construction of a new national identit…
“Journalists Discovered Łódź Like Columbus”
This article examines Polish urban travelogue literature and reportage concerning the industrial city of Łódź in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Łódź, a rapidly growing textile production center, was one of the few places which paved the way to real industrial, capitalist modernization in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. It was inhabited by large non-Polish populations and came to be perceived as alien, hostile and eve…
Days of Labour
The article investigates the city ofŁódź as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We considerFoucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and theTsarist rule in theScheibler andGrohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is t…
Civil society under pressure
(2020). Civil society under pressure: historical legacies and current responses in Central Eastern Europe. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Vol. 28, Civil Society under Pressure: Historical Legacies and Current Responses in Central Eastern Europe, pp. 1-6
Days of Labour
The article investigates the city ofŁódź as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We considerFoucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and theTsarist rule in theScheibler andGrohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is t…
What Bears Witness of the Failed Revolution
This article investigates the rise of political antisemitism during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. Extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals the role antisemitism played as a political device assisting the construction of new political identities and their dissemination through political mobilization. National Democracy and their labor branch, the National Workers Union, took the…
From Empires of Nations to the Nation-State of Minorities
The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the n…
Civil society and the public sphere. Historical trajectories in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria
This paper seeks to explain the current attacks on civil society in Central-Eastern Europe by means of a comparative historical sociology of the public sphere. I relate current populist discourses targeting liberal civil society practitioners in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria to the historical developments of the public sphere in those countries from the emergence of the modern political sphere (late 19th century) till today. In all three cases I c…
Historicizing the asynchronous modernity in the Global East
In this paper, we aim to forge potentially generalizable insights into “Eastern” urbanity and its confrontation with modernity. We radically historicize analytical categories such as modernity and take them as vernacular categories of practice utilized by actors in a given space and time. Grounding our theorizing in findings from a larger research project on modern self-perceptions in an industrial city (Łódź in today’s central Poland), we descri…
The Birth of the Militant Self
The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery and destitution, (2) autodidacticism, (3) politi…
Vernacular Marxism
The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political langua…
Modernizacja mas. Moment polityczny i dyskurs endecji w okresie rewolucji 1905-1907
Artykuł rozważa zmianę w endeckim dyskursie politycznym w okresie rewolucji 1905–1907. Podejmuję w nim analizę zmiany stosunku do „mas”. Wizję modernizacji mas traktuję jako specyficzną formę dyskursu nowoczesności – reakcję na niezdeterminowanie, nieadekwatność politycznych instytucji i języków i gwałtowne rozszerzenie realnego uczestnictwa politycznego. Argumentuję, że określona koniunktura czy splot zdarzeń, zarówno z dziedziny myślenia polity…
Polityka dla miast, miasta dla polityki. O możliwości (i konieczności) radykalnej polityki miejskiej
Tekst podejmuje problem rzekomej bezalternatywności globalnych przemian dla realiów miejskiego życia. Miasto jako naturalnie wspólnotową, „komunistyczną” forma ludzkiego życia i może okazać się obszarem, w którym niezależnie od ogólnych trendów można realizować lewicową, „dospołeczną” politykę. Już istniejące formy szeroko rozumianej władzy mogą skutecznie oddziaływać na miejskie relacje społeczne. Wartości i normy są powszechnie delegowane na mi…
Młyn biopolityki
City of Lodz is an exceptional case of industrialsettlement, a focal point of di}erent kinds and techniquesof power typical for nineteenth century industrial capi-talism. Disciplinary power parceling bodies, biopowerproviding with population stability, paternalistic gaze ofthe factory owner and monarchic sovereignty of the tsa-rist rule once met in the Scheibler and Grohman’s indu-strial establishment and nearby workers’ housing estate.{is periph…
Utopia popularna.Kilka uwag o książce Tomasza Majewskiego Dialektyczne feerie
Recenzja książki: Majewski T. 2011. Dialektyczne feerie: szkoła frankfurcka i kultura popularna
Poststrukturalistyczna teoria dyskursu i empiryczne badania społeczne
Discourse Theory is a heterogeneous ensemble of approaches, which have recently brought some refreshment in the social and political sciences. Although it offers a kind of social ontology based on post-structuralist approach towards language and discourse, it does not provide with a given methodology, ready to use in empirical research. Hitherto prevailing researches have rather looked for empirical exemplifications of the assumed theory, than ma…
Róża Luksemburg i konstruowanie podmiotu politycznego
Rosa Luxemburg is not only an economic author. In texts written indramatic days of 1905 revolution she presented a path-breaking account of constructionof political subjectivities, and thus revolutionary subject, in the very processof revolutionary struggles. The political dimension of her interventions shed anew light on her overall theoretical oeuvre. There is a constant tension between adetermination of revolutionary process by economy and a p…
Brak
the proliferating debate on the very nature of neoliberalism, its historical emergence, and its reference to various social actors still does not come out of the agenda in a clear fashion
Reading Polish peripheral Marxism politically
This article appraises the political writings of three Polish Marxists from the early 20th century, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanisław Brzozowski and Rosa Luxemburg. In the specific peripheral conditions and because of the entanglement of different struggles in the Polish Kingdom under Tsarist rule around the 1905 Revolution, it was no longer possible for Marxists and political theorists to refer to any firm political ground: whether the organic u…
Introduction Toward a discursively oriented historical sociology of the modern
toward a discursively oriented historical sociology of the modern
Modernizacja mas. Moment polityczny i dyskurs endecji w okresie rewolucji 1905-1907
Artykuł rozważa zmianę w endeckim dyskursie politycznym w okresie rewolucji 1905–1907. Podejmuję w nim analizę zmiany stosunku do „mas”. Wizję modernizacji mas traktuję jako specyficzną formę dyskursu nowoczesności – reakcję na niezdeterminowanie, nieadekwatność politycznych instytucji i języków i gwałtowne rozszerzenie realnego uczestnictwa politycznego. Argumentuję, że określona koniunktura czy splot zdarzeń, zarówno z dziedziny myślenia polity…
What Bears Witness of the Failed Revolution
This article investigates the rise of political antisemitism during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. Extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals the role antisemitism played as a political device assisting the construction of new political identities and their dissemination through political mobilization. National Democracy and their labor branch, the National Workers Union, took the…
“Journalists Discovered Łódź Like Columbus”
This article examines Polish urban travelogue literature and reportage concerning the industrial city of Łódź in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Łódź, a rapidly growing textile production center, was one of the few places which paved the way to real industrial, capitalist modernization in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. It was inhabited by large non-Polish populations and came to be perceived as alien, hostile and eve…
Days of Labour
The article investigates the city ofŁódź as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We considerFoucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and theTsarist rule in theScheibler andGrohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is t…
Wyparte historie XIX wieku
W prezentowanym numerze Praktyki Teoretycznej stawiamy sobie stosunkowo skromne zadanie
Vernacular Marxism
The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political langua…
Under one common banner
Marzec investigates socialist strategies in relationship to antisemitism during the 1905–7 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. An extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals a dialogical differentiation of political identities and ideological positions. Antisemitism was an important political device used by the National Democracy party (Endecja) to assist in the construction of a new national identit…
Socialisms in the Tsarist Borderlands
This article presents a conceptual history of socialism in two Western borderlands of the Russian Empire-namely, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland. A contrastive comparison is used to examine the birth, dissemination, and breakthrough of the concept from its first appearance until the Revolution of 1905. The concept entered Polish political conversation as a self-applied label among émigrés in the 1830s, whereas the opponents o…
Repertoires of industrial conflict in a modern city. Łódź, Central Poland 1861-1921
This article examines the changing patterns of industrial conflict in a rapidly modernizing Eastern European city, focusing on a multi-ethnic industrial hub. I follow repertoires of contention in four crucial moments characterized by shifting scales of the geopolitical embeddedness of the city: (1) an early Luddite riot of 1861 in the Polish autonomous sub-state within the Russian Empire, (2) the first massive labor protest and the following pogr…
The Birth of the Militant Self
The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery and destitution, (2) autodidacticism, (3) politi…
(Im)mobilités des idées. Socialismes itinérants dans les régions de Pologne et de Finlande de l’empire de Russie
Cet article se penche sur le concept de socialisme itinérant et propose une étude comparée des deux frontières occidentales de l’empire de Russie – c’est-à-dire le royaume de Pologne et le grand-duché de Finlande. La méthode comparative a pour objectif d’examiner la naissance, l’expansion et la chute du socialisme depuis ses premières manifestations jusqu’à la révolution de 1905. Nous utiliserons ici la méthode du transfert d’idées modernes, afin…
Rising Subjects
Civil society under pressure
(2020). Civil society under pressure: historical legacies and current responses in Central Eastern Europe. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Vol. 28, Civil Society under Pressure: Historical Legacies and Current Responses in Central Eastern Europe, pp. 1-6
Civil society and the public sphere. Historical trajectories in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria
This paper seeks to explain the current attacks on civil society in Central-Eastern Europe by means of a comparative historical sociology of the public sphere. I relate current populist discourses targeting liberal civil society practitioners in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria to the historical developments of the public sphere in those countries from the emergence of the modern political sphere (late 19th century) till today. In all three cases I c…
Historicizing the asynchronous modernity in the Global East
In this paper, we aim to forge potentially generalizable insights into “Eastern” urbanity and its confrontation with modernity. We radically historicize analytical categories such as modernity and take them as vernacular categories of practice utilized by actors in a given space and time. Grounding our theorizing in findings from a larger research project on modern self-perceptions in an industrial city (Łódź in today’s central Poland), we descri…
Working Out Socialism
This essay examines socialist workers' autobiographies as inscriptions of the self unfolding from illicit political militancy in tsarist times to the establishment of actually existing socialism in twentieth-century Poland. The autobiographies written in state socialism pin together the workers' strivings for a better life with their intellectual pursuits and their negotiation of the relationship between work and politics. While this essay is inf…
Subversive Concepts
“The worst thing one can do with words,” George Orwell once wrote, “is to surrender to them.” One must “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way,” to use language for “expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought,” he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements “let the meaning to choose the words” and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surr…
Political science (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies (12 works) · History (11 works)