DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

The Department builds on, promotes, and enriches the longstanding and wide-ranging body of scholarship developed by the University’s political theorists and researchers who combine the historical study of political thought with the problem-oriented approach characteristic of political philosophy.

The Department also examines the interpretation and application of theoretical and ideological models in analysing:

• Current trends in political life.
• Crises in contemporary capitalism at the level of large-scale and overarching social structures.
• Patterns and styles of political culture.

This work is accompanied by research into the political dimensions of different spheres of social life and the interaction between fields of knowledge and academic disciplines concerned with the study of politics.

Some members of the Department also conduct extensive research into techniques of social influence in politics. This includes the exercise of power and struggles for power, as well as political manoeuvring among social forces and groups of formally equal standing, social pressure, and resistance. Publications in this area examine the classification and distinctive features of methods of political action, including persuasion, manipulation, coercion, violence, terror, terrorism, nonviolent action, suggestion, and the influence of authority figures.

The Department engages in both internal discussion and wider scholarly debate among political theorists and political philosophers about the meaning of politics, the concept of “the political” in different contexts, and the criteria for identifying something as political.

In methodological terms, research focuses on:

• Hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches to interpreting political phenomena, including the epistemic status and heuristic value of cognitive metaphors, and insights from discourse theory.
• Dialectical tools of analysis, addressing contradictions, antinomies, paradoxes, transformations, and reversals of meaning.
• Classical models of functional, structural, and functional-genetic explanation.

These approaches inform both the thematic focus and the methods used in the Department’s collective and individually authored publications.

The Department cooperates with leading academic centres in Poland specialising in political philosophy, political theory, and the history of political thought. It has initiated numerous lines of research, scholarly projects, and publishing initiatives.

Department staff regularly participate in the longstanding annual conferences of university departments and units specialising in political theory. The Department helped establish and remains a major contributor to Teoria Polityki, an annual journal produced jointly by Poland’s political theory community, involving more than a dozen academic institutions. The journal is published by Jagiellonian University Press, with academic responsibility for successive issues rotating among departments and units at participating universities. Four issues have been published, and a fifth is being prepared for publication.

Staff whose expertise lies at the intersection of political philosophy and the history of political thought also contribute to Myśl Polityczna, a journal with a nationwide reach supported by several leading research teams in Poland. Published twice a year by Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, the journal has appeared in six issues.

Some members of the Department also take part in academic meetings and publications bringing together political scientists from institutions across Poland under the banner of “critical political science”. This work has so far resulted in two edited volumes.

International cooperation is undertaken by individual members of the Department. Further details are available in their staff profiles.