Ludwik Krzywicki

Abstract

Ludwik Krzywicki, a classical author of Polish sociology, is generally known and presented as a Marxist and evolutionary theorist. The present article analyses the past major presentations and historical reception contexts of Krzywicki's work, and finds that this understanding of him as a ‘Marxist’ and ‘evolutionist’ essentially employs synthetic categorizations' which are not only misleading, but essentially wrong. The recent claim that the present lack of interest in Krzywicki's work is the result of a contemporary shift away from Marxism and evolutionism in Polish sociology is here confronted with the argument that it is actually the result of a much older process arising from these very synthetic categorizations of Krzywicki's work. Upon the basis of this critical analysis and then the insightful commentaries of Krzywicki's humanistically oriented contemporaries Znaniecki and Obrębski, which after World War II up until the present have been neglected, a first attempt is made to open up Krzywicki's work as a non-synthesizable ‘primary dynamics of cultural change’.