Likwidacja Europy. Totalizm i demokracja w rozważaniach Zygmunta Mysłakowskiego
Liquidation of Europe: Totalism and Democracy in the Reflections of Zygmunt Mysłakowski

Summary/Abstract: Łukasz Michalski discusses the content of Zygmunt Mysłakowski’s 1938 book Totalizm czy kultura (Totalism or Culture). He points to the consonance between book’s diagnoses of the socio-political situation in the late 1930s and Timothy Snyder’s description of the second decade of the twenty-first century. He argues that we can see an analogy between the dynamic growth of totalisms in the interwar period and the mechanisms that can be observed in Europe, America, Russia today. Mysłakowski and Snyder leave no illusions in their descriptions of their present milieus. However, in Mysłakowski’s book there is a cognitive incongruity inasmuch as, alongside the main line of the argument with its recognition of the value of democracy, there is also an appreciation of the figure of the leader (Marshal Józef Piłsudski). Michalski examines this tension as the context of the diagnoses of our contemporary situation.

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