About the School

Many different reasons played their part in the fact that the tradition of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas was abandoned. In the Polish context the most important reason was obviously the political one. Forced mass emigration after the March events in 1968, leading to the dispersion of many distinguished members of the Warsaw School around the globe, and the repression of the freedom of speech in the conjunction with a change of the intellectual atmosphere in Poland – those two factors primarily contributed to the academic discontinuation and rendered impossible to develop and advance the very idea of the School. Single thinkers may still have been working and publishing in the spirit of the School but their efforts have to be recognized as isolated. Moreover, after the 1989 this current of thought sank in even deeper oblivion as both an aftermath and part of natural and understandable gesture of severance from the troublesome legacy of the previous political system.