The Legacy of Polish Solidarity ― Social Activism, Regime Collapse, and Building of a New Society

Originating in a conference organized in Jerusalem in 2009, jointly by the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, this volume aims to explain why there was not mass rejection of the market economy after the fall of communism in Poland (or other countries). It refers to the experience and the heritage of the Polish Solidarity movement, established in 1980 under Lech Walesa, as representing the first breach in the institution of communism. This collection of texts from leading Polish and foreign sociologists and political scientists focuses on displaying the multilayered and evolutionary nature of Solidarity. Nine articles are: solidarity and patterns of contentious politics in the 2000s in Europe; the many lives and deaths of the solidarity movement; the solidarity movement; the paradox of solidarity’s legacy; solidarity: its evolution and legacy; fulfilled promises and unexpected results; East European civil societies in the 90’s; solidarity’s afterlife; the velvet and the classical revolutions. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Andrzej Rychard, is a sociologist, Full Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Director of the the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His main areas of research are sociology of political and economic institutions and post-communist transformation.
Gabriel Motzkin is the Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and an emeritus Professor of the Hebrew University. He held the Ahad Ha’am Chair in Philosophy, and was also a member of the Departments of History and German Literature. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. He has also been a Fellow at the Siemens Foundation, the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, the Einstein Forum, the Wiener Institute at Tel Aviv University, the Max-Planck-Institute for History, the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin), and the Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung (Bielefeld).