The lecture on 29th February 2012 was entitled “Too much or too little of politics?”
Unusually, the meeting took place in the middle of the week, but the occasion was special: our guest was professor Marcin Król, one of the most prominent figures of the Polish intellectual scene in recent decades. He’s a political philosopher, historian of ideas, essayist, dean of the Faculty of Social and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Warsaw, the founder of “Res Publika,” the author of numerous publications, such as “Historia myśli politycznej: od Machiavellego po czasy współczesne” (“The history of political thought from Machiavelli to modern times”), “Patriotyzm przyszłości”(“The patriotism of the future”), “Bezradność liberałów: myśl liberalna wobec konfliktu wojny” (“The helplessness of liberals: liberal thought regarding the conflict of war”). During his visit to Gdynia, Marcin Król reflected on the status of politics in today’s world.
According to professor, today we are dealing with a crisis of democracy, which is associated with its stagnation. Evoking such thinkers as Giovanni Sartori, Michael Oakshott, and Francis Fukuyama (with whose diagnosis of “the end of history” he cannot agree), our guest offered a vision of politics as an activity involving risk, like democracy which develops due to errors and conclusions drawn from them.
The author of the book “Nieco z boku” (“Slightly on the side”), the copies of which he signed after the lecture, also outlined three possible ways out of the current democracy crisis, namely, deliberation, interaction, and participation.
