Znaniecki, Florian Witold

Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958) was a Polish and American sociologist and philosopher of culture, born on January 15, 1882, in Świątniki, Poland. He died on March 23, 1958, in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He formulated a theory of cultural systems with a humanistic coefficient that relates to the active experience of meaning and the axiological significance of cultural data. For Znaniecki, cultural data consist of values, and these differ from the mere “things” that are the object of research in the natural sciences. With his writings in Polish and English, Znaniecki developed a systematic sociological theory built on a theory of action that aimed at the understanding and explanation of [Page 897]the social dynamics of culture, change, and creativity. Znaniecki considered sociology the centerpiece of the cultural sciences because all systems of culture in their existence depend on social interactions. Sociology is a special cultural science that takes systems of social actions as its subject matter. They bear on social values—individuals and collectivities—as they appear to others and to themselves. Social values are the most complex and changeable among all cultural values—economic, religious, aesthetic, and others. Znaniecki investigated the ontology and theory of cultural and interactional foundations of more complex social systems, as they emerged from social actions, in sociological studies of knowledge, education, and national cultures. Znaniecki was also a researcher of civilizational processes and of the world society. His remarkable contribution to the methodology of cultural sciences was shaped by the principle of the humanistic coefficient that demands the comparative study of the experience of individuals and collectivities as historical subjects, since every element of a cultural system is what it appears to be in the experience of people who are actively dealing with it. To this end, he relied on case studies and biographical methods and assumed as a general rule of qualitative methodology analytic induction leading to abstraction and generalization.

Znaniecki studied in Geneva and Zurich, as well as at the Sorbonne in Paris, and took a doctoral degree in 1910 at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow where he presented the dissertation The Problem of Value in Philosophy (in Polish). In addressing the debates between idealists and realists, Znaniecki formulated an original humanistic stance, which was subsequently developed into the system of the philosophy of culturalism. A synthesis of these theses was presented in Cultural Reality, published in Chicago in 1919. The basic principles of his system were actions and values, through which he assumed a constructivist, relativist, and pluralist view of reality as a changeable historical world. In this respect, he held much in common with pragmatists.

Znaniecki came to the United States in 1914 at the invitation of William I. Thomas, whom he met as the director of the Bureau of the Society for the Protection of Emigrants in Warsaw. He was lecturer in Polish history and institutions at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago in the years 1917 to 1919. Together with Thomas, Znaniecki wrote the classic work of the Chicago School The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), considered a turning point in the development of theory and method in the social sciences. Here, Thomas and Znaniecki made unprecedented use of personal documents, including the letters and memoirs of migrants. Znaniecki took the initiative to write the Methodological Note, in which were formulated the conceptions of values and attitudes comprised by people's definition of the situation. This provided a theoretical schema of social becoming through the interaction of subjective and objective factors—that is, the interplay of personality and culture. Action patterns were analyzed focusing on social psychological factors such as wishes or motives for recognition, the need for security, the exercise of power, and the impact of new experiences. They also drew on sociological factors such as the formation of institutions and organizations.

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