Social Oppression:

by Adam Podgórecki

Podgorecki examines oppression that results from pressures inside social groupings, large and small, effected by different normative and conformity-inducing mechanisms designed to regulate human behavior. Podgorecki provides a critical examination of the empirical findings in the most important and imaginative experimental studies of various types of oppression (including those by Milgram and Zimbardo), as well as data collected in natural settings like asylums or concentration camps. New interpretations of those findings furnish a new angle of vision requiring modification of the existing typologies of individual adaptation including the best known typology elaborated by Merton (conformity, ritualism, innovation, withdrawal, rebellion). Podgorecki goes on to trace regularities in historically recorded patterns of behavior of people living under totalitarian and post-totalitarian conditions. Finally, based on these insights and on the recent developments in sociology of law, a new theory of law is advanced, which utilizes as its important axis a conceptual differentiation between the official and intuitive law. Recommended for scholars of sociology, social psychology, political science, and especially criminology.

152 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 1993

About the author

Adam Podgórecki (1925–1998) is an internationally renowned legal sociologist and one of the founders of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL). Podgórecki was also one of the founders of the first institute at Warsaw University which was devoted to the social scientific studies of law.

He carried out a systematic programme of socio-legal research throughout his academic life, wrote and published widely in both Polish and English and developed a unique socio-legal line of inquiry which can be traced back to Leon Petrazycki’s theory of “intuitive law”. According to Adam Czarnota, Podgórecki developed his social theory “in opposition to the Marxist theory of law and the state. He stressed the importance of empirical comparative material guided by theoretical hypothesis. Crucial for him was the typology, derived from Petrazycki,of intutitive and official law”.

To honour the significant contribution made by Adam Podgórecki to the development of sociology of law and to shape the history of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL), the Board of RCSL decided in 2004 to establish the annual Adam Podgórecki Prize. This prize is awarded for outstanding achievements in socio-legal research