Durkheimians Transformed: The Case of Poland

The paper discusses the engagement of Polish sociology with works by two generations of Durkheimians. First, based on a quantitative scrutiny, it summarizes translations, discussions and absences of their key works in the interwar, communist and post-1989 periods. Second, qualitatively, it explains, how interwar meshing of Durkheimianism with Marxism by Stefan Czarnowski, a student of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, and counted among the fathers of Polish sociology, became an important part of Polish post-war sociological mainstream and a tool in the hands of local sociologists against a crude version of Marxist propaganda of the Party State. More generally, fusion of Durkheimianism with Marxism in the specific case of East-Central Europe calls for some attention in the studies of the Durkheimian school as a movement in international social sciences. Although reception of Durkheimianism in various geographical and linguistic areas has been studied, it seems that a deeper, contextual historicization is needed to understand both how this school made a global career and how it changed in various localities.