An Abandoned Past

This book attempts to describe the experience of Polish society as it transitioned from communism to democracy, and show the changes that took place in the country from 1989 to 2015. It confirms that these changes can be better explained by analysis of the dominant imaginations of past, present, and future.

The monograph it attempts to identify the definitions of the past, present, and future used by Polish political elites in electoral discourse from 1989 to 2015. It aims not just to identify these definitions, but to compare and contrast them, and show how they evolved over this period. At all times, the dominant definitions were a resource of temporal consciousness for society. For this reason, they can be taken as a basis for scholarly "diagnosis." They can reveal key insights not only into social imaginations of the three dimensions of time, but into social change itself. Therefore, the fundamental aim of this work is to show how society developed its approach to the past, present, and future from 1989 to 2015.

Autorentext

Piotr Borowiec is Assistant Professor at the Department of Theory and Methodology of Politics, Institute of Political Science and International Relations, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. His research interests focus on the shifts in modern politics, political science, and political sociology and theory.

Inhalt

Key words: social time - the past - the present - the future - politics - communism - post-communism - social change - transformation

Part I THE PAST: DOMINANCE OF COMMUNISM

Part II THE PRESENT: FROM TIME TOGETHER TO "HERE AND NOW"

Part III THE FUTURE: TIME TO REMEDY THE PRESENT