Stanisław Andrzejewski (or Stanislav Andreski) (8 May 1919,
Częstochowa
Częstochowa ( , ) is a city in southern Poland on the Warta with 214,342 inhabitants, making it the thirteenth-largest city in Poland. It is situated in the Silesian Voivodeship. However, Częstochowa is historically part of Lesser Poland, not Si ...
– 26 September 2007,
Reading, Berkshire
Reading ( ) is a town and borough in Berkshire, England, and the county town of Berkshire. It is the United Kingdom's largest town, with a combined population of 355,596. Most of Reading built-up area, its built-up area lies within the Borough ...
) was a
Polish-British sociologist. He is known for his indictment of the "pretentious nebulous verbosity" endemic in the modern social sciences in his classic work ''Social Sciences as Sorcery'' (1972).
Andrzejewski was a
Polish Army
The Land Forces () are the Army, land forces of the Polish Armed Forces. They currently contain some 110,000 active personnel and form many components of the European Union and NATO deployments around the world. Poland's recorded military histor ...
officer. During the
German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 he was taken prisoner by the
Soviets. He escaped to Britain and fought against the
Germans
Germans (, ) are the natives or inhabitants of Germany, or sometimes more broadly any people who are of German descent or native speakers of the German language. The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, constitution of Germany, imple ...
on the
Western Front in
Władysław Anders' Polish II Corps.
At the
University of Reading
The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as the University Extension College, Reading, an extension college of Christchurch College, Oxford, and became University College, ...
, United Kingdom, he was a professor of sociology, a department he founded in 1965.
Works
His books include:
* ''Military Organization and Society'' (London, Routledge & Paul, 1954, 2nd edition 1968)
* ''Elements of Comparative Sociology'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964). Published in the United States as ''The Uses of Comparative Sociology'' (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1965) Theoretical perspectives grounded in concrete examples.
* ''The African Predicament: A Study in the Pathology of Modernization'' (London: M. Joseph, 1968). Tough-minded social criticism informed by the wider context of Andreski's sociological knowledge. E.g. Andreski notes the conditions of an escalating feedback spiral of distrust which—a few years after the publication of this book—led to Idi Amin's expulsion of the East Asian ethnic community from Uganda.
* ''Parasitism and Subversion: the Case of Latin America'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966)
* ''Social Sciences as Sorcery'' (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972)
* ''Prospects of a Revolution in the U.S.A.'', (1973)
* ''Syphilis, Puritanism and Witch-hunts'' (1989, Macmillan Press, Ltd., London). Includes an appendix on the lessons one might apply from this history to the AIDS epidemic.
* ''Wars, Revolutions, Dictatorships'' (1992, London). A collection of articles written in the 1970s and 1980.
See also
*
Edward T. Hall
*
Marvin Harris
References
External links
*
Review about "Military Organization and Society"
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Andreski, Stanislav
1919 births
2007 deaths
Polish sociologists
Polish Army officers
Academics of the University of Reading
Polish emigrants to the United Kingdom