Aleksandra Kania

A political scientist and historian of political thought, born in 1950. He was a professor at the University of Bologna and made an in-depth study of the authors and categories of political modernity, with attention to the concepts of power, sovereignty, conflict and political space.

In 1945 she moved to Warsaw and in 1949 she graduated from the Tadeusz Reytan High School. From 1949 to 1954 she studied sociology at the University of Warsaw. In the 1960s she was involved in the development of Julian Hochfeld’s concept of “open Marxism”. In 1967 she defended her doctoral thesis Karl Marx and the Problems of Alienation in Contemporary American Sociology, supervised by Zygmunt Bauman. In 1978 she obtained her habilitation and on 17 November 1990 she was awarded the title of professor. In the 1970s she conducted, among other things, research on local government; in the 1980s, pioneering research on Poles’ attitudes toward various nations and ethnic groups; and from the 1990s she took part in international studies on values (European Value Study). She is co-editor of two anthologies presenting contemporary Western sociological thought: Elements of Sociological Theories (1975) and Contemporary Sociological Theories (2006). She lectured and carried out research at Stockholm University, Stanford University and Indiana University at Bloomington. She was a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party and of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarność“.