Scientific Rationality between East and West: Leszek Nowak's Understanding of Marx’s Method

• In Event: The Search for Legitimisation in a Post-Stalinist Society: Polish Intellectuals and the Reconceptualization of the Marxist Project

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyse Leszek Nowak’s methodology of science from the 1960s and 1970s as one of the examples of Polish Marxism’s growing proximity to Western tradition. I will present the basic assumptions of Nowak’s idealizational theory of science and discuss Rafał P. Wierzchosławski’s claim that Nowak’s ideas reflected the technocratic and managerial character of the modernization processes in Gierek’s era. Finally, I will point to criticism of Nowak that can be found in the works of Slovak Marxist Václav Černík and Polish Marxist Jacek Tittenbrun.

Author

• Adam Klewenhagen, U of Warsaw (Poland)