Guest editor: Michał Roch Kaczmarczyk
There are not many works to which sociologists owe as much as to The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Although a hundred years have passed since the publication of the first two volumes of this extensive book, it remains not only one of the most influential classics of sociology but also a mysterious work, in part forgotten and underutilised. Today there can be no doubt that the analyses contained in the book were constitutive for such subdisciplines as the sociology of migration, deviance, and social change. The work also played a fundamental role in establishing the methodology of qualitative research, including the biographical method, and in particular, the analysis of letters, official documents, and press clippings. The appearance of The Polish Peasant changed how applied sociological concepts were defined and to a large measure determined the critical nature of the contemporary social sciences.
A comprehensive study of The Polish Peasant, as well as of Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s other works, still needs to be written. The present volume does not claim to outline such a project but hopes to call attention to several questions that have either been overlooked or did not play a central role in previous interpretations of The Polish Peasant.