Ossowski, Stanislaw

(1897-1963)

A noted Polish sociologist and philosopher. Together with his wife Maria Ossowska, a philosopher in her own right, he published extensively in the philosophy and psychology of science. However it was the publication of Class Structure in the Social Consciousness in 1957, after the barren Stalinist years when sociology had ceased formally to exist in Polish universities, which projected him into the sociological limelight.

This work was a typology of the various views of class, social structure, and social processes, and the intellectual milieu from which they emerged. He argued vigorously against the crude bipolar Marxist class analysis of the time. More importantly, he articulated a view in which the existence of status privilege and economic inequality persists, even after the formal abolition of the class system. In particular he sought to introduce the importance of the study of subjective perceptions of inequality, of attitudes, and to research what was new, inherited, or even absent within the supposedly classless societies of real socialism . He also drew attention to similarities between capitalist and socialist societies, in the way in which they presented their societies as classless, and attempted to remove the bases for ‘group solidarity amongst the underprivileged’. The nationalization of the means of production may have been a necessary condition for moving towards the kind of society envisaged by the Marxist-Leninists, but it was certainly not a sufficient condition, and he asserted that many old forms of inequality had re-emerged in a new guise.

Ossowski had the intellectual breadth as well as the moral courage to write this treatise at a time when even the discussion of social stratification with reference to socialist peoples' democracies was taboo. He displayed his socialist concerns alongside intellectual rigour and scholarly autonomy and thus set the foundations for a sociology which survived and flourished in conditions of repression where in other countries of real socialism it all but disappeared.