Conclusion

Abstract

In retrospect, this study of Cieszkowski’s life and writings has come to involve the examination of a complex personality, a curiously consistent system of thought and an extremely rich and fluid intellectual milieu. Thus, it has attempted to fulfill at least two obvious purposes: first, to provide a fairly definitive intellectual biography and an analysis of an admittedly secondary, but not negligible, figure; second, to relate this figure to the intellectual and political currents of his age. These goals suggest two other less apparent but more far-reaching purposes. First, it has been my hope that a study of Cieszkowski would serve as an instrument to the understanding of a critical period in European social thought. Second, it has been my intention to question the adequacy of a dichotomous interpretation of this period and, by extension, of dichotomous models of social thought as such. In these concluding pages I should like to summarize whatever insights a study of Cieszkowski can contribute into these general problems and to offer a hypothesis which might explain the difficulties of classifying Cieszkowski in terms of familiar models.