Liberalism did not fare well in nineteenth-century Poland. There were, of course, several noteworthy Polish liberals, but there was nothing approaching the sustained liberal hegemony that existed elsewhere in Europe. For only a few brief years in the 1870s and 1880s did a group of liberals known as the Warsaw positivists dominate the intellectual landscape of the Russian partition.² Soon, however, the tone of the liberal press turned from aggressive and polemical to defensive and apologetic, as a new generation shifted towards both the socialist left and the nationalist right. By the time Poland regained its independence in 1918 there was no major political party which could be described as unambiguously liberal. Many individual liberals tried to influence public policy, but the socialists, populists and nationalists competed for the privilege of claiming the era as their own. There are many reasons why liberalism could not be sustained as a political force in Poland, and most of them may appear obvious. The stereotypical base for a liberal movement, an urban bourgeoisie, was notoriously weak; the Catholic church was both influential and conservative; and the early twentieth century was a time of turmoil and crisis — not the sort of environment in which liberal politics tends to thrive.³