The Historical Connections and Development of the Polish Economy and Sociology

The author shows the connections of the Polish economy and sociology in the period of their formation. Despite the fact, that the first Polish economists and sociologists were inspired by the Western works, their own scientific views and works were formed in basically different social and political conditions which dominated in the then partitioned Poland. That is why the Polish economy and particularly sociology of those days were in some areas (research problems) belated when compared with the Western ones, but much ahead of the Western in others. Some important concepts of todays Western sociology were introduced in the Polish social sciences one hundred years ago (e.g. the concept of cultural capital). In the second part of the paper the social forces, specific for the system of so called real socialism (communism), which conditioned its functioning, were shortly depicted. The constitutive features of the contemporary social macrostructures were, from the one hand , immune for classical, Western type scientific analysis, and they precluded a development of adequate concepts and research tools, from the other. Therefore adequate theory of the social reality of those days is still an unfulfilled task of the Polish social sciences.