Power and Civil Society: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Real Socialism

(Hardback)

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The seeds of this volume were contained in a series of lectures delivered by Leszak Nowak to his co-interned activists of Solidarity in a Polish prison in 1982. From the stance of a political philosopher, Nowak suggests statements about power; as a social theorist, he proposes a systematization of hypotheses into idealized models of increasing realism. Most books on socialism are based on either radical or conservative ideologies; "Power and Civil Society", however, begins with radical assumptions but reaches rather conservative conclusions. Nowak's discussion of the three independent main social divisions - owners/producers, rulers/ruled, and priests or mass-culture-media/believers - reveals the separation of these divisions in class societies and their integration into a triple class of rulers-owners-priests in real-socialism societies. Nowak contends that triple-class rulers wrest control of political power from both owner and priest classes and undergo regularities of political power in its pure form. The thrust of the book is an elaboration of a proposal of the general theory of political power that confronts it with its classic area of application - the history of the Soviet Union - by offering a series of models beginning with the most abstract. Each subsequent model presents a more complicated network of interconnections that characterize the phenomenon of political power.

Author Bio

LESZEK NOWAK is Professor of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. In 1984 he was expelled from the Department of Philosophy because of cooperation with the Solidarity movement. In 1989 he regained his previous position. Since 1977 he has published four books, in foreign languages only, that deal with aspects of Marxism. He has contributed both chapters and articles to numerous foreign language publications on Social Science and Marxist themes.