by Marek Maj
In mid-twentieth-century Poland, two philosophers—Stefan Rudniański and his son Jarosław—devoted themselves to spreading ideas and techniques of mental productivity and efficiency among the country’s students and growing class of white-collar workers. Their intellectual projects showed a remarkable degree of continuity, beginning from the same basic premise that cognitive processes are an ‘economy’: a complex, optimizable system. Jarosław’s divergence from his father on other key points, however, participated in a significant turning point in the transnational history of what Anson Rabinbach has termed “the science of work”: the shift from neurological to motivation-oriented theories influenced by management studies. That this shift took place in the late 1950s and 1960s demonstrates the limits of dominant narratives about Cold War intellectual and economic history: well before the arrival of electoral democracy and TINA-economics, before it even began “opening up” to Western businesses and institutions during the détente, post-Stalinist Poland hosted a lively culture of research on work, organizations, and management. Already then, Jarosław and his colleagues adapted ideas from both sides of the Cold War divide and drew upon homegrown traditions of the interwar period.
Stefan was born in 1887 in Brest in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), but grew up in Warsaw. In the 1920s, after years as a teacher and labor activist, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on eighteenth-century French materialism and translated Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1747) into Polish. As a member of the Communist Party of Poland from its founding in 1918 until his expulsion in 1937 during the ‘Great Purge’, he also translated Lenin’s treatise on epistemology, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), though the translation would not appear until after Stefan’s death. In it, Lenin polemicized against the “reactionary solipsism” of “Machians”—leftist enthusiasts for the writings of Ernst Mach, who wanted to confine science to the description of relations between sensory ‘elements,’ avoiding the positing of hidden metaphysical entities. Though it has been argued that Stefan’s concern with the economization of cognitive processes bears a Machian influence, he was not interested in ‘thought’ per se but rather brain activity as a form of work. In this respect, his research was ahead of its time—anticipating the “neural turn” in the social sciences and humanities in the late twentieth century—by providing a materialist account of intellectual labor that was decidedly neuro-centric—the workings of the brain as an organ, and its relation to other bodily functions were key.
His popular textbook, Technologies of Intellectual Labor: Hygiene, Organization, Methodology, issued in 1933 by the Polish teachers’ union in its Library of Self-Study series, opened with a warning about “the harmful consequences of the brain’s over-exploitation [ekonomia rabunkowa]”—the first of many economic metaphors (19). Unlike muscles, which cease expending energy once we finish a physical activity, the brain is like a wheel that keeps rotating after it is set in motion. “What should be done,” Stefan asks, “to make use of the brain’s invaluable inertia—to tame this powerful force which, left to itself, becomes dangerous… yet, when mastered and skillfully employed, can accomplish far more good than is usually supposed?” (24). Drawing on contemporary research in several languages, the textbook is divided into two parts: “Hygienic Self-Organization” and “Technical Self-Organization.” The first is concerned with “the link between the cerebral cortex and all the functions of the organism,” which is, Stefan writes, “a working machine” and thus requires the correct inputs—nutrients, exercise, rest—to function optimally. The second part switches focus to techniques of “skillful” listening, reading and note-taking. It details, for example, the work routines of Rousseau, Darwin and other eminent figures to illustrate the possibility of purposefully planning for and maintaining flashes of inspiration (219). The expanded second edition, published on the eve of the Second World War, included more advice for working autodidacts, stressing how important it is “to make use of… even the shortest stretch of time” (71).
While Stefan’s focus on intellectual workers—he addressed mózgowcy, literally “brainiacs”—distinguished him from his contemporaries, such as Karol Adamiecki and Edwin Hauswald, who wrote the first works on management and organization theory in Polish, his work should nonetheless be placed in the context of interwar Poland’s uneven industrialization. The embrace of American productivism in the form of Fordism and Taylorism by insurgent, modernizing states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union has been well documented, and many interwar Polish intellectuals were similarly obsessed by Americanism. In 1936, Stefan contributed to these debates in On the Rationalization of Intellectual Labor in the West and the USSR (1936)—an area of study in which Stefan claimed that the Soviets had surpassed capitalist authors. He critiqued the latter—“bourgeois scientists,” especially eugenicists—for their class chauvinism:
…none of them even thought to study the conditions in which the mass worker strained his brain in the few hours he stole from his own rest, having neither a study, nor a writing desk, nor even a work chair, working amid the din of the household and his neighbors, in the stuffy air of a damp apartment. (6)
A socialist science of intellectual labor on the other hand, as was now beginning to emerge in the Soviet Union following an early infatuation with time and motion study, would be concerned with cutting “brain losses” and achieving the “best socio-creative results with the most economical expenditure of the brain” (16) through the coupling of “planning and calculating working time” with mass-produced office furniture, stationery, and typewriters (23–24). More ambitiously, it would follow “the postulate of organized collective control over the productive process of mental work” (25), through, for instance, “[testing] as often as possible the social value of… individual reflections… by subjecting them to collective examination in the purifying crucible of discussion” (29).
Stefan did not live to see the full impact of his work. He was killed outside of Lviv in 1942, probably during a German bombing raid. His son, Jarosław (1921–2008), escaped from a Soviet labor camp and fought in Anders’ Army at Monte Cassino, but survived the war. He continued his father’s intellectual legacy in postwar Poland—now part of the socialist bloc. Both of them shared a habit of reading across ideological divides, but Jarosław’s extensive referencing of postwar Anglophone literature in particular stands out as one of the hallmarks of the so-called Polish school of praxeology and speaks volumes about the relatively liberal intellectual climate following the post-Stalinist “thaw.”
Praxeology’s founder Tadeusz Kotarbiński conceived of it as a “general science of efficient action.” While the term had been used before—most notably by Ludwig von Mises, for whom action was the a priori foundation for economics—Kotarbiński did not think that praxeology should restrict itself to economics or any single domain, but rather provide rules and concepts that apply to the planning, execution, and correction of any kind of action, from manufacturing and farming to jurisprudence and the arts. Trained in the Lviv-Warsaw School of logic, Kotarbiński reoriented its analytic precision toward a “small philosophy” that would help people perform tasks and achieve their chosen goals.
Institutionally, the Polish school coalesced within the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Following the publication of A Treatise on Good Work in 1955—in which he outlined many of praxeology’s main principles—Kotarbiński secured the creation within PAN of the Laboratory for General Questions of Work Organization, later upgraded to the Department of Praxeology. From 1962 the group edited Materiały Prakseologiczne (Praxeological Papers), soon retitled Prakseologia, which became the field’s chief outlet. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the institute and its journals was how Western-facing they were. Apart from researchers from the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, it welcomed guests such as US-based economists Charles Myers and Kenneth E. Boulding. The institute’s library records, meanwhile, show an influx of books by the likes of Peter Drucker and other experts in the growing fields of management theory and behavioral economics.
While much praxeological writing, somewhat ironically, was written in theoretical terms, Jarosław inherited a concern for educating intellectual workers through accessible language and clear advice. The sole position in the bibliography of Techniques of Intellectual Labor (1960), published as part of a course for agricultural engineers, is Stefan’s textbook, which by that point gone through two more editions. And though Jarosław does outline many techniques, he also claims that “even the best knowledge of technique… cannot replace even average interest in the work.” Interest in one’s work, “regardless of its social value or personal benefit,” is the “sine qua non” of working “better, faster, with less fatigue.” It isn’t willed but can grow by adopting a new “angle of view” and “becoming aware of the real motive” behind one’s work. “Our work becomes much better and more effective,” Jarosław writes, when motives are clarified and “mental energy isn’t suppressed by inner censorship” i.e. judgement and opinions (3–8).
A notable difference between Stefan and Jarsosław therefore is the emphasis that each placed on the physical and psychological: there is less of Stefan’s staunchly materialist man-machine vision in Jarosław’s writings. On Effective Thinking (1964), for example, draws on the work of American business psychologists such as Frederick Herzberg, to claim that self-worth is central to motivation: the wish to secure a sense of value according to accepted criteria (13). There is a subtle shift from Stefan’s opening gambit of the brain’s “overexploitation” to Jarosław’s version: “how do our grey cells become gold?” (5) Both of them investigated when intellectual work could be performed at the highest efficiency—when the worker “begins to think smoothly, solve problems effectively, and absorb necessary information”—but Jarosław was more concerned with the “psychic content” of individuals (6–13). He argued that while truly selfless group work would flourish most readily under socialism—since socio-economic relations shape psychology—pursuit of self-worth would remain the dominant motivator until such a selfless attitude becomes widespread (13). Creative, non-automated tasks depend heavily on “internal organization”—a mental readiness and the ability to direct motivation (29). Low self-esteem, fear of failure, or constant comparison can sap this readiness, diverting energy into maintaining “a mask” (31). The book’s mixing of concepts that might today sound glib due to overuse—motivation, self-worth, and fear of failure—with quotations from the likes of Khruschev give it a peculiar feel: something approaching a Marxist-Leninist self-help book. At one point, Jarosław paraphrases Engels on humanity’s mastery of nature: mastery of one’s mental life requires knowing its laws and applying them to influence “the nature within us” through indirect external means (33).
After gaining his doctorate in 1967 with a dissertation on the application of praxeology to school teaching, Jarosław summarized nearly a decade’s worth of research in Effectivity of Thinking: Selected Problems (1969). In it, he elaborates on “the psychological factors which make effective thinking… a highly difficult task” for homo cogitans—the title of the first chapter—from “an improper attitude to one’s own errors in thinking” to “the skill of [subordinating] oneself” (211–15). At the beginning, though, he makes a striking observation: “Of the several thousand works published in the last decade on the issue of managing other people’s motivation, thinking and behavior, works on the ability to manage one’s own motivation, thinking and behavior constitute a negligible percentage” (7). Here, in short is what united the Rudniańskis and set them apart from most of their peers: their concern for the worker rather than the firm, and for self-improvement and the cultivation of personal goals rather than the monitoring and directing of others. In this sense, the work of these two Polish Marxist philosophers resonates more with our times, in which mózgowcy work for themselves, than it did with theirs.
Beyond its immediate resonances in the present, the Rudniańskis’ work compels us to ask fresh questions about Cold War exchanges of ideas and to look for new chronologies, mechanisms, and archives. It speaks to intellectual historians’ (re)turn to political economy and to calls for greater “cross-fertilization between labor history and the history of science,” but does not fit neatly into either current. The Rudniańskis’ diverse intellectual influences, which ranged from Enlightenment theories on the mind-body problem to contemporary systems theory, play a role in their defiance of categorization. So, too, do their political commitments: as trained philosophers who wrote for an audience of lay readers—translating academic discourse into usable advice for workers—they offer a reminder of how much intellectual historians could benefit from looking at textbooks, guides, manuals and other “unconventional” sources.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Marek Maj is a PhD student at the EUI in Florence, where he is writing a history of knowledge and economic life in the Free City of Kraków (1815-1846).
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Workers in a Kraków post office during World War II, ca. 1939–1945, Ewald Theuergarten, via Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, public domain.
